Maynard Kuona takes a look on Gnome 2.6-pre and discovers a whole new world of new features and well-crafted interfaces built-in on every Gnome-bundled application.
In the beginning, there was Linus. He said, let there be Linux, and Linux was there. Actually he wrote some code. Then there was Miguel. He said, let there be GNOME. Actually he announced it on IRC. But then GNOME was there. As many years passed, both Linux and GNOME grew in size and complexity at niceness. And so it is that we have on our doorsteps, Linux 2.6, and GNOME 2.6.
I downloaded Fedora Core 2 test 1 recently to give GNOME 2.6 and Linux 2.6 a spin. Yes, GNOME 2.6 wasn’t out yet when I was writing this article, but I could test with the release candidate included in Fedora.
A lot has been said about 2.6. 2.6 is a much bigger jump from 2.4 compared with the jump 2.0 to 2.2, or 2.2 to 2.4. There are two things most people will have been waiting for. First, GTK 2.4 is now out, and most, if not all core GNOME components already use it.
Second, there is spatial Nautilus, which implements a new desktop navigation paradigm. Here I use the word navigation very loosely, and this will become clearer later why.
Third is Gstreamer. This has come a long way and is implemented more widely this time around. It is certainly more integrated with the core GNOME. Its use is wider spread throughout the environment.
The are a few other enhancements in GNOME too which we will encounter as we go along.
So, what is new.
Heading over to the module list to see what actually made it in, and what didn’t make it. And why?
There are a few new tricks in this release of GNOME. Some below the surface, and some above it.
Before you begin reading, please note that this is not a review of default GNOME. So the theme used is not the default, and neither is the arrangement. This varies from distro to distro, and anyway, I wanted a review which featured GNOME and the way it worked, not the way it looked per se.
GNOME keyring
GNOME Keyring. This is a new module. This module is responsible for authentication information. It enables you to keep your authentication information for a specified period, currently either for a session, or in some database. No more typing your passwords in plain text for everyone to see. It is good that this is now in GNOME, but the bad is that it does not support ftp. So I cannot connect to an ftp site and have a prompt for the password yet.
This is something that needs to be done very quickly too. Though many are of the opinion that a dedicated ftp client is best for ftp, it is always nice to have a quick way to navigate in ftp sites, and I would prefer the Nautilus view of an ftp site, rather than how gftp does it for example.
GTK 2.4
There is GTK 2.4, with the much awaited file selector. Well, what about it? It brings a few new widgets of its own, plus the file selector. The flame wars should be over at last. Is there anything good about this file selector. Well, there is the good, the bad, and the beautiful.
The bad is that there is no way to open hidden files with the file selector, or if there is, it is well and truly hidden from your truly, the guys doing this review. This is a bug that should not have made it past release candidate. I am truly stumped. Even if it is somehow possible, it should be far easier.
The good is that the file selector looks and acts very well in the rest of the cases.
The beautiful: Well, the book-marks. I can now book-mark directories I use a lot easily in the file selector. It comes with a few bookmarks of its own too, such as the home directory, and root file system. If you book-mark a directory, and then move it, it removes it from the book-marks, and if you move it back, the book-mark reappears. This is probably very useful for removable volumes.
Nautilus
Nautilus sports a brand new ‘look’ in this release. Ah, the much discussed and criticised and critiqued spatial browser. Here is the short version of how it works. Every directory is treated like an object. That is to say, it has attributes associated with it. These attributes are set on the fly by the user as he uses his machine. The user need not (always) configure how he interacts with his desktop. So much for the mumbo jumbo, what does this actually mean?
Here is a little journey I took in trying to learn about spatial nautilus. And a few observations.
I opened my home directory, and I had so many files. I resized this so that I could see as much (all) of the directory as I could without a need to scroll down or across. This is automatically saved. Next time I open my home directory, this setting will be remembered. It will also remember its position on the screen the last time it was open, and which view was used and the zoom if any.
Now here is something neat. If I open the home directory, and I open a sub-directory, it opens the subdirectory in a new window, and it changes the icon in the home directory for that sub-directory to show that it is open. A nice visual cue as to the state of your browsing. Then, if you open another window, and move that directory while it is open, you will not have nautilus crash or anything of the sort. It remains open. In fact, if you move the folder to another directory, it will remember the settings for that particular folder, where ever you move it to. If you move to another virtual desktop, and open the new window from there, it is transferred to the current virtual desktop. In fact, over there, it will still show you that the directory is open, by showing you an open folder.
At the bottom left of each window, is a button that will enable you to go up into the parent folders, right up to the root file-system (/). So even after closing all the parent directories, and you realise you needed one of them, you can go directly to that folder if it is above the current folder in the hierarchy. The new mode requires you to change the way you use you file manager, which is probably the reason many balk at it.
It does open a new window for every folder, which is probably the main bone of contention. However, this is changeable by a Gconf key, and therefore your distributor can easily choose a default.
The main difference between the navigational mode and the spatial is how yo work with a navigational file-manager compared to a spatial one. With navigational, you go in and out of folders, treating your folders as containers for files. The presentation of the files inside them is really secondary, as a lot of it is dependent on where you are browsing from and so on. A spatial manager makes use of space to add another dimension to the experience, and at least, in my view, make you treat each folder more like a pin board, to borrow the Rox term for the desktop. The spatial arrangement of you browser windows, i.e., their arrangement in space is set by you, and the presentation of files in each folder is set by you. For example, you may want a tall and narrow window for your music folders, and a wide one for your pictures folder. You prefer an icon view for this folder, and a list view for another. This all matter when it comes to spatial browsing. if for instance, you always open two folders side by side because you copy between them a lot, then every time you open the folders, they go into the correct position automatically. The beauty is you only have set the preferences once, and you are done. A more thorough ‘treatise’, if you will, on spatial interfaces is available at Arstechnica.com if you follow the following link.
Nautilus is now fast. I mean, literally a hundred times faster. It open instantaneously. It helps, of course, that I have a 2500+ processor with 512MB of RAM, but that was never the reason for nautilus being slow in the first place. The reason for that was mime type sniffing, which meant the hard-drive was the limiting factor. Sniffing used to be the default behaviour for nautilus, but now, it is first extension based, then it sniffs if it cannot find a clue from the extension. So it now leaps to the screen and is ready before you can say “nautilus is slow”.
Nautilus has revamped context menus. My favourite new (though overdue) addition is the paste files into folder. I hated having to open a folder just to paste a file into it. That pet peeve is gone. For all those tarballs, the context menu is now only to create an archive, without any fancy options. All it does is ask for a name for the archive, and create an appropriate type archive based on the name you will have given. Extracting archives through the context menu is now only to “Extract here”, rather than giving a multitude of options in the context menu. It should be more than adequate for most people.
There is also the ‘Computer’ on the desktop, which basically shows you some common devices, e.g., hard drive partitions, and CD-ROM drives. This was first introduced somewhat by Ximian, but in this release, it works much better, and will not call all your hard drives ‘CDROM’. It is a handy way to access your drives pretty quickly. There is a way to remove this from the desktop using Gconf, so those who balk at seeing something similar to Windows need not worry excessively.
Another feature is the list columns preferences in the preferences panel. This enables you to specify the columns you see in the list view. So you can now specify the order in which the columns in the list views are presented as well as specifying which columns you would like to see.
Templates are now a part of Nautilus. You drop in a file, the template, into the nautilus templates directory, and these become available via right click in nautilus and on the desktop. Further you can now open a terminal at any terminal location right from nautilus.
Gedit
Gedit has always been another target of abuse by those who do not hold GNOME in the highest esteem. It is accused of being a little complex for a simple text editor, but not as good for programming. Personally I think some users are too used to emacs, the do everything and nearly-an-operating-system editor.
Gedit is helped out in this case by gtksourceview, a widget for syntax highlighting in GNOME. This widget is used also by monodevelop, so expect it to do highlighting very well. It also has syntax highlighting for a number of configuration files. This is one to watch.
But there is not much to say about Gedit though, its one of those very essential but very simple apps in GNOME.
File-roller
File-roller is the GNOME 2 archive tool. It creates, extracts and modifies a number of archive types. It is ported to GTK 2.4, as are all the apps in the release. New in this one is support for extracting the contents of rpm files. This is really nice, I often want to extract something from an rpm file like a spec file from an srpm. This will do the job pretty nicely now. No more using arcane tools like rpm2cpio, and then having to extract again. This pretty much does the job well.
File-roller is really simple, like many of the core GNOME apps. But you will be hard pressed to find an essential feature you need it doesn’t have.
Epiphany
Epiphany became the default web browser for GNOME in the last release. Before that, people generally gravitated towards Galeon, as it was the only worthwhile GNOME browser for a while. However, recently, when the time came for people to actually choose a browser that should be part of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform, Epiphany was chosen because of its commitment to the HIG. Here is a lesson to be learnt, it you want your app to be part of GNOME, learn to love the HIG. It is one of the points of pride for the project.
Galeon was not booted out, contrary to popular opinion. It was only ever the de facto standard when there was no real competition. Epiphany was conceived for and made to be a part of GNOME in contrast. You could say, Epiphany was made to not work without GNOME. This means using as much of GNOME as possible, and avoiding reimplementing as much as possible. Galeon has also somewhat taken this direction, but it is still a very independent project whose authors feel they would like to do things their way.
What is new in Epiphany this time around. Well, not too much on the surface. The download manager is revamped. You now have the option of specifying a default download directory, and it will download there without asking you again and again. This is similar to the recent release of Mozilla Firefox.
Toolbar editing is also improved in this release, and is more similar in implementation to that in Firefox rather than other apps. So you have a window with all your buttons, and you drag to/from toolbars to add/remove buttons from toolbars.
The full-screen mode is revamped, and very good choices have been made to maximise screen real estate available for page viewing whilst having as many essential features as necessary – two obviously conflicting requirements. Full screen presents you with the address bar, the tab bar, and a button on the bottom left for exiting the full-screen mode.
A few things did not make it into Epiphany in this release, like the certificate viewer, but for the most part, Epiphany is a top browser, which is capable of all but the most demanding tasks. For web development, I wouldn’t recommend it. Mozilla (Seamonkey) is probably a better suite, being less narrowly targeted and better equipped. But then again, that was never its target audience.
Metacity
Metacity, the GNOME window manager has been tweaked a little for this release too. Right clicking on the window border of an app will now bring up an improved context menu. The menu now has 2 levels, one for commonly used actions, and another with more specific items. The list of workspaces has been moved one level deep, and in its place, you now have the option to move a window to the next left or right workspace. This is a good decision, because for someone with many workspaces, this list becomes unbecomingly long, and for the most part, you only move to the next workspace anyway.
Metacity has a new ‘reduced resources’ mode, which encompasses previous options like disabling the animations. But in the interests of providing visual feedback as much as possible, when you drag a window for example, in reduced resources mode, you get a frame instead of the whole window and its contents being dragged along. Unfortunately, I could not get a screenshot of this. It refuses to come out on the shot.
Another noteworthy addition is also the addition on an ‘on top’ state,. Now you can have your favourite windows always appearing on top of the rest. Another good addition.
What didn’t make it.
Some modules, notably rhythmbox, evolution and totem did not make it into this release. evolution was not going to be ready, Ximian does not ship pre-release software, and rhythmbox was not ready in the desired state. Nevertheless, it should make for a more exciting 2.8 release of GNOME, considering the new look evolution will be part of the proper release. The new look evolution is already looking much better than before.
It is a testament to GNOME’s insistence on shipping quality that they do not ship pre-release software. The people responsible for the modules actually withdrew themselves because they were not going to be at the required place in time. This is a good attitude, which helps minimise potential trouble regarding what modules do or don’t make the cut. Delaying the release for modules which needed more time was not going to be an option anyway, because of the strict adherence to the timetable. GNOME releases are time based, for those who may not have known, rather than feature based.
I must admit being a little disappointed because I was really looking forward to the new evolution especially. But I am prepared to wait the few months or so to ensure I get a quality product.
Other changes
There are a few other changes which are too numerous and too small to cover in great detail. Here is a probably incomplete list of the changes.
Acme is removed, and its functions are moved to the keyboard shortcuts preferences. No more icon in the notification area just for multimedia keys a new module, gnome-netstatus, makes its way in. It provides handy notification about the status of your network, as its name implies. it may be seen in some of the screenshots.
Dasher makes its way into this release, but unfortunately, my source for GNOME 2.6 did not have dasher, therefore I was unable to give it a shakedown.
The help system is much faster now. It practically leaps to the screen. before, you had to do yelp-pregenerate to get any meaningful speed from the GNOME help browser, but now it fast enough. Also, it provides very nicely formatted help pages which are intuitive to go through and follow.
Gpdf has also grown up in this release, and now support bookmarks in pdfs, and now prints them too. This is a really good pdf viewer.
The keyboard capplet in the control centre gets a slight improvement. It is now able to set international keyboards, and you are able to choose your keyboard from a large list.
The background chooser is much improved. In this release, it is able to have a number of wallpapers ready for easy choosing, rather than having to go through the file system every time you wanted to change a wallpaper. It is brought into line with the theme chooser dialogs too to add to the consistency.
The future of the Linux Desktop looks pretty bright, and even now it is very able to replace many proprietary environments. GNOME sets a new standard for itself and other open source projects in this release. They have gone against the grain in some ways, by switching wholesome to spatial browsing as default in their interface, and have done well first time. Everything is faster n this release, and the level of polish is upped even more here.
The HIG is really a core part of GNOME and its influence resonates in all core components. Much care is taken to make everything work consistently and predictably, although some decisions that have been made, e.g, the open file dialog, are questionable.
The Future
This release is not out yet, but eyes are already looking to the future. Rough plans are available here.
Discussion is taking place to actually reduce widgetry above the GTK level, and hopefully, this will help blur the line further between a GNOME app, and a GTK one. A lot of project do depend on GTK. XFCE and Rox come to mind. People are already committing to see through a number of issues currently in GNOME and adding new features, with ftp browsing being one of the issues where someone has already pledged to fix for the next release. Roll on GNOME 2.8.
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Very nice article.
That pretty much sums it up. Well done! I can’t wait ’till FC2 is released so I can give it a spin.
Question for you: what GTK theme is that in the screenshots? Very pretty!
Disabled menu items, like Paste, should not show. It makes the menu longer than they should be. And the stretch icon menu items should disappear. It’s un-needed fluff.
Add to Music Library-type menu items should not exist. Only exceptions are folder/file operations like anti-virus scanning, compression and other similar types of non-specific file type activity.
Is in XFCE CVS. It uses the XFCE GTK engine. what you really need is the gtkrc file, which is CVS. You can download that using the web interface assuming you have the theme engine already. I can’t remember what is called exactly, but just go through all the gtkrc’s they have and you will find it.
Just to add, the file chooser shots shown were not using gnomevfs, just plain old gtk+. If you select the gnomevfs (using gconf) you get more location like the floppy drive an any locations in fstab appearing in the default bookmarks list.
I use FC1 & Slackware 9.1 after FC2 test 2 .I think Dropline-Gnome is were I,d like to see 2.6
I think a many people actually strech some icons which the use a lot so that they are bigger and thus easier to hit targets. That is actually a good thing.
The Music Library thing is added by rhythmbox. Its not part of the default anyway. I am sure it will be worked on once rhythmbox becomes a part of GD&DP.
I think removing things like Paste because there is nothing to paste is a wrong idea. It suggests that “copy…paste” does not work rather than suggesting that there is nothing in the copy…paste buffer to paste. IMO of course.
now this is idiotic, that it didnt move in. what is this gnome-vfs supposed to do IF not being able to open files that lie on some server. if you do webdevelopment, you soon hit the borders of gnome’s great HIG, and have to resort to the commandline to upload files, which sure is nice, but somehow throws away all the things you got a windowing system for.
Where can i see Evolution with the supposedly ‘better look’ in action (screenies)?
some screenshots here.
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/
Nautilius has support for ftp. Just go to the menu and select “Connect to server”. It is also documented in its help how to pass the user and password.
What it doesn’t do is to ask you for the username and password. So, it is not nice to have that information showing in your lacation 😉
Maynard,
You just have to go open up nautilus-either mode, and select preferences…there is an option on the first tab(Views) labeled “show hidden and backup files”…Once this is chcked hidden files will appear…..
First, I’m using 2.6 and love it. Nautilus seems to crash a bit when doing using it to ftp or if you select it to view files as “audio” sometimes. My questions are: 1.) How do I get the keyring to work? How do I launch it? 2.) It was mentioned you can open a terminal from nautilus in an folder..but I don’t see the option.
I’m afraid he means the file chooser not being able to open hidden files (not nautilus). It was fixed recently. Read here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136077
Until the new version arrives, you can do what Karl suggests and drag and drop the file from nautilus to the application (that is, unless the app doesn’t support drag and drop).
“And the stretch icon menu items should disappear. It’s un-needed fluff.”
It comes in very handy when using SVG icons.
Why is the Nautilus “spatial” feature the recipient of so much attention? This is neither inovative nor radical.
Remembering folder position, size, display type (list, detail, thumbnail, etc.) are long-time features in the Mac (classic) and Windows (TM).
…for dropline to get it out.
1) The article icon is cute! (I guess Eugenia did it)
2) Very good article!
3) About Gedit: I’m actually not happy with it. The reason isn’t that it would be too simple or too slow, but the bulky MDI interface. Especially together with spatial Nautilus I _much_ prefer using a spatial text editor (yes, for programming and web development as much as writing simple texts). For this reason I wrote my own text editor (not hard with Mono and gtksourceview), but it would be very nice if GNOME would come with a quality spatial text editor.
Great article Maynard, I already learned 4 new things…..
Further footnote….
If you double mouseclick on the folder/directory you wish to open-the new folder/directory opens while closing the parent windows(ie. the where just clicked in)…
>1) The article icon is cute! (I guess Eugenia did it)
Yup.
I was thinking of making each toe a heart of a different color, but that was a bit too much.
ugghhh. that is depressing-and although it has now been resolved in CVS, it looks like gedit still won’t work with it-until gedit gets fixed….
almost enough to dampen my spirits….
Does anyone know if you can make panels with rounded edges. It was possible in 2.2 but I cant do it in 2.4
man, each new release of gnome makes me more and more of a fan. i like the minimalistic approach, while still keeping a nice amount of eye-candy and functionality. im more then a little disappointed that totem and rhythmbox will have to wait for 2.8 though. I havnt used evolution in ages, but just reading up on dashboard gives me the incentive to start using it again. Gnome has quickly become one of my favorite OS UIs, and 2.6 appears to be yet another quantum leap forward for the DM
has nautilus got ACL support now ?
I really miss a filemanager that handles Posix ACL.
I also like the new icon. I feel there should be two icons. The heart for pro-Gnome articles and a broken heart or something else for anti-Gnome articles. Otherwise, it would make more sense as just a toe.
I’m currently running FC2 test2 on a Compaq laptop. Kernel 2.6.5. Very nice, snappy and the very first time I have my laptop acpi functional fully without doing my own custom kernel recompile. Gnome 2.6 has admittedly become my fav DE lately. Even my OS X friends look at it and say ‘Wow, nice..’ Multimedia is not a problem for me after installing xine, totem and a few others.
BS I say to your comment about them not shipping pre-release software. Don’t get me wrong, I love GNOME, and use it every day, but 2.6 has some very serious bugs that simply shouldn’t have made it past the most cursory of testing. Not all these are just me either, or some quirk in my install, as they are known bugs and problems. The big ones that got me were:
– new keyboard applet to replace ACME is fine, but the keys set either don’t work or give errors when trying to set them. This is apparently fixed in CVS
– nautilus’s new and improved network ability has a big bug in it, giving an error message when you double click (sometimes) on a object on the desktop created by the ‘connect to server’ option. IE: ssh:// or ftp:// URIs. This is known and is being worked on apparently.
– documentation to do with navigating the network under nautilus in the help docs has not been updated from the 2.4 version, and this section is completely wrong (sec. 7.8.1 IIRC).
There were other things I noticed as well, but those were more things that would make sense to me, not “bugs” so much. These few were big ones that really surprised me that they made it through. I’m glad that the release went out on time (kinda) and everything, and I’m glad it’s here for me to find bugs in, but…..
The new fileselector is crap, imo.
I mean, I know about CTRL+L ‘trick’, but why the HELL did they remove a place to type the location in *in the window itself*??
Massive, and stupid, step back in usability, imo.
Spatial Nautilius is annoying too.
I’m gonna give it another week, then if I’m still not happy it’s back to XFCE. (Might give K** 3.2.1 a shot, maybe…)
Hi
Almost every .0 release it quickly followed by .1 release with the bugs fixed. it worked very well with kde 3.2.1. I think the version that distributions will actually ship will contain the fixes. This is the reason why you should wait for them to do it imho.
You can select files in the file chooser directly by typing <Ctrl>-f. A little box comes out, and as you type, it selects the first file with the first latters matching. You can delete and correct as you go too.
> Disabled menu items, like Paste, should not show.
Yes, it does make the menu longer. However, it is based on a priciple of spacial stability in the user interface. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines explain it well (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/…). Basically, the idea is that menu items are always in the same place, regardless of what is enabled/disabled. Also, knowing that a menu item is on that menu, but currently disabled can sometimes be informative (“Save…” disabled because there have been no changes in the document).
> And the stretch icon menu items should disappear.
I think I agree. It’s pretty cool, but I’m not sure the functionality is worth the added UI elements. It’s also a bit odd that this can only be done on the desktop.
documentation to do with navigating the network under nautilus in the help docs has not been updated from the 2.4 version, and this section is completely wrong (sec. 7.8.1 IIRC).
Yes, this is very unfortunate. For reasons that aren’t all that interesting, parts of the User Guide are misleading or just incorrect, and there just wasn’t much community review to catch these problems. This will be addressed for the 2.6.1 release.
If anybody is looking to get involved, the GNOME Documentation Project always welcomes new contributors.
Eugenia, are you progressively making all these new icons for stories. If so, I think you are doing an impressive job, but don’t have a cute overload. I think there has been at least 2 hearts in the last few days.
> You can select files in the file chooser directly by typing
> <Ctrl>-f. A little box comes out, and as you type, it
> selects the first file with the first latters matching.
Unfortunately, things aren’t so great when using this trick in a directory where several files start with the same letter. Typing that letter doesn’t take you to the first file beginning with that letter as you would expect. For example in /usr/ I have a file called hxplay and hxplay.bak along with the usual directories. <CTRL>-f opens the magic box but pressing the “h” key highlights the rt-synth directory for some reason. Only untill I type “hx” does hxplay get highlighted.
Oh well…
I’m running Gnome 2.6 on FreeBSD 5.2.1 and so far it’s been great! Faster, better and better looking. Spacial Nautilus is so good it should be illegal (it’s dangerously close to the file manager I always wanted)
Some blackspots remain though
– gedit is slooow : I use jedit instead and that is much faster despite having a jvm in between.
– fileroller is slow, in the time it takes to read a file I can decompress it from the command line
– what the hell is up with metacity window placement ? Sometimes it favors top-left, sometimes it’s all over the place.
Despite this Gnome 2.6 is the best desktop available on any platform at the moment IMHO.
Although I like Gnome, I really think they should work on making it look more appealing. I know people are going to say that computers are there to do work, but I have to look at it all day and if it looks nice it makes me feel better.
Some people find the KDE default icons too colorful, but them coupled with the new default widget set makes KDE look much better than default Gnome in my opinion. Gnome seems very gray and boring to me, and the icons have a very old fashioned looked to them. This scares new users away as they tend to think ugly looking applications are inferior.
Fileroller is not slow. its the way tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives are that makes it seem slow. when you decompress from the commandline, you just go through the file once as you decompress it. tar is a sequential format suited for Tape ARchives, hence the TAR. This means a tar.gz archive has to be read sequentially from the beginning to the end to see what files are there. I think zip files have a sort of index of the files, so to know what is in the zip file, you just look at the index.
Try open a zip file using file-roller. It should be near instantaneous on a fast machine. opening a tar.gz file is still limited by the hard-drive then. I just tried this with a 340MB zip file, and can confirm it.
I really can’t agree with you about the icons, to me they look very nice and shiny. In fact I think that the icons are the visually most appealing part of a default GNOME installation and compete well with every competition.
The default controls and window borders are a different story though, I can see how people could find them too gray and boring (though it’s still my favorite besides Bluecurve and I’m currently using it). It’s not easy to create a theme that is both visually appealing and doesn’t get annoying after using it for a longer time. I haven’t seen such theme for Gtk yet other than the default and Bluecurve.
Something like Plastik would be nice, but even Plastik isn’t perfect and tends to look old on me pretty soonish. If it would be easy to create something like Aqua or Luna, we’d have it already.
Hi
I can agree on aqua but luna looks like crap. plastik and industrial themes are far far better
Hi,
A theme is much more than just window borders and window border colors. Luna is very nice in the buttons and eye candy. If you use it for a while, you will start to notice lots of little things it has that are very nice. Nearly every widget has a nice mouseover effect (that isn’t garish) to indicate when something is selectable or not, tooltips fade in and out, etc.
It is intyeresting how some of the object oriented features being talked about were available in the Work Place Shell (IBM’s OS/2) oh, 10 years ago.
I have always wondered if anyone would try to achieve something like that with a modern flair and look, and it looks like Gnome is trying.
Best of luck…
They are also the scrollbars, which are garish, the big green arrow/acknowledgement button, which is garish, the combobox dropdown button, which is garish, and the orange tab highlight, which clashes. The window borders are just the icing on the scheisse cake.
Microsoft certainly has good artists. The Luna-Silver theme is actually pretty nice, and Watercolor (the Whistler theme) was beautiful. I don’t know why they tied them up in the basement so they could ship Luna-Playskool as the default theme!
try Ximian’s Industrial from XD2.
It looks very nice.
(RPM : ximian-artwork)
Well, when I first saw that Watercolor theme, all I could think was “if XP is going to look like this, we have nothing to fear”. Unfortunately it didn’t look like this and Luna turned out to be rather nice.
I’d agree that Silver looks much slicker than the default, but just because it’s using a different color scheme doesn’t mean that the quality of the skin is worse.
Of course it doesn’t even come close to Aqua, but I do think that Luna looks more professional and sharp than both Industrial and Plastik together. 😐
I’m a .NET developer, i have used Linux since Redhat 6.2 and i love Linux alot but recently i want to try out MONO .NET for the development in Linux. Is Gnome 2.6 still not support with MONO, GTK# and all of its component?. If not what version it will be support?
As many years passed, both Linux and GNOME grew in size and complexity at niceness. And so it is that we have on our doorsteps, Linux 2.6, and GNOME 2.6.
This is pretty childish !!
Gnome was there only to compete with KDE.
Nobody who is using Linux since 1.9 would see GNOME as the “Linux Dsktop” !
There is GTK 2.4, with the much awaited file selector. Well, what about it? It brings a few new widgets of its own, plus the file selector. The flame wars should be over at last. Is there anything good about this file selector. Well, there is the good, the bad, and the beautiful.
KDE has a file selector since 1.? ! and it has been alwyas quite good !
So quit joking with this elementar desktop widget. GNOME just isn’t up to date on widgets. In fact it seems like a wannabe.
try Ximian’s Industrial from XD2.
It looks very nice.
After 1 month you will get really tired of it.
Gnome 2.6 currently does not officialy support ANY of the bindings. There is a nice GNOME Platform Bindings release (http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/bindings/), but that is also not officially supported by GNOME. This is a GNOME policy for now, and I dont think it will change anytime soon.
That dosn’t mean that you shouldn’t use the bindings. They are almost all of high quality and many are used in commercial enviorments (specifically the python, C#, and c++ ones, last I recall)
P.S. I am not officially connected to gnome or any of the bindings in any way.
Microsoft certainly has good artists. The Luna-Silver theme is actually pretty nice
For the money theybget paided I don’t see any real difference ! GUI artistry is a must but the general accepted concept is a holy grail not yet discovered ….
I just wanted to extract some archive with path which already existed on my system.. I dragged and dropped it in new and amazing nautilus (sarkazm) from file-roller: it asked me: the directory /path/to/dir already exists do you want to overwrite it? well ofkoz I knew it existed.. so I pressed ok – and this stupid program wiped out everything under old location and put only content of the archive into it!!!! geezz this is not copying this is replacing!!!! thanks good god I had backup.. but imagine extracting using file-roller + new and amazing nautilus into something like /home/your_very_important data..
Personally I don’t like luna at all. And it makes windows xp rather slow and resource-eating…
but like everything, this is subjective.
(notice the comments? A:”Ñ is great” B:”No, it stinks. I like better option Z” C:”It’s great but could be greater”. The REAL thing is having options Z and Ñ, so everyone can choose what they like)
So don’t think your opinion is universal, only MY opinion IS the TRUE ONE and ONLY.
(Whaahhahaha….)
However the wipeout problem described two comments ago should be corrected.
The BEST copying/replacing/updating dialog I have ever seen (and behold, it is even better than windoze kommander’s) is definitely the one OpenTracker (BeOS) had. I believe everything should have those options when replacing/copying/uptdating. Besides it is very well done.
I don’t have the box to spare to play with a linux install but keep trying the live cd variants to see what the state of play is like. a 2.6/2.6 would be nice to play with.
can’t believe i posted but forgot to comment on the article. this is one of the better articles i’ve seen posted on osnews for quite some time. well done.
The only live distro that I know of that comes with Gnome by default is Gnoppix [http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gnoppix].
But devolpment is kinda slow, so I wouldnt be expecting 2.6 any time soon.
DROPLINE GNOME 2.6.0 HAS JUST BEEN RELEASED!!!
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
Being a real long time linux and gnome user, I see only one complaint with the current direction of Gnome: the window manager. I understand that beginner users need something simple, but metacity is simply not powerful enough for the poweruser: lacks far too many features. I used sawmill first as a replacement (then it got renamed to sawfish
, and recently, I got addicted to openbox3. It’s got every little tricks and features I want, and completely configurable – love it.
Is there any chance to get openbox3 voted in as an alternative window manager to be *part of* the core gnome as well?
“Is there any chance to get openbox3 voted in as an alternative window manager to be *part of* the core gnome as well?”
I hope not, not out of any meanspirited desire to see you not get your choice but because the overwhelming amount of choices was holding back Linux on the desktop for a wider audience. It also holds back the development of each DM if they have to account for multiple WMs.
No, let each DM come up with their blend of front and backend and work them out to the best they can. That way we might get lucky and desktop usage will flip over the magical breakeven point and other proprietry software development houses will start to develop and it can take off.
The only live distro that I know of that comes with Gnome by default is Gnoppix
Not true. Morphix-Gnome is another Gnome live-cd:
http://www.morphix.org/
I agree with the comments about GNOME trying to rip off Mac. Right down to the “keyring” which is called keychain on my powerbook.
Also, the spatial nature of nautilus goes beyond what the author discusses, the fact that each folder opens in a new window is a required property of a spatial interface. Read this article:
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.html
which describes some of the gripes with the Mac finder not being spatial. A spatial browser must treat a folder and a window as representations of the same object. If you have a window representing a folder open, attempting to open the same folder should just change focus to the window for that folder you already have open, and opening new folders must open their corresponding window representation. I don’t care for this design per se but that is the nature of a spatial browser. The idea being that in the real world, if you pick up a folder, open it and place it on your desk, you cannot go back to the cabinet and grab the same folder, open it again and have two views/copies of the folder sitting on your desk. A spatial browser in a computer must obey the same properties. The idea that a folder remembers your position, etc flows from the same reasoning. If I put a folder on my desk, but cover it up with other items, it’s position and attributes remain the same when I uncover it to use it again. The problem is that we have become so accustomed to using navigation style interfaces, we no longer expect objects in the computer to mimic the behavior of real world objects. Proponents of spatial browsers claim that new users expect objects in GUIs to behave as their real world counterparts. They want naive user intuition that the window is the folder to be true. And they believe that the names we give UI elements should conform closely to the properties of the real objects they are named after.
This is a problem with user interfaces on linux. If in some distros the spatial feature is disabled, but in others enabled, any intuition that a user might have can be thrown out the window. It not so important that the browser is spatial or not, so long as it is consistent. I know people complain about the mac os interface not being customizable or skinable, but that is by design so that users can form an expectation of how the interface should look/behave and have that carry over onto all machines running the mac os x operating system. Yes, linux is about choice, blah blah, but at some level consistency is needed because users don’t want sitting at another linux desktop to be a whole different experience. In someways the spatial browser is a silly idea when you consider that users don’t even have an expectation of what the title bars of the windows will look like. Depending on the theme selected by users or their distros the close/minimize/maximize buttons may be in different locations, some may be missing, or represented by different icons. Sometimes too much choice or variety can be a bad thing when it comes to getting users to feel comfortable with a system, and until some creates a user interface that realizes this linux will always lag behind the Mac GUI or even (gasp) Windows.
Anonymous, the comment modded down didn’t describe Gnome best. It described Gnome in a very biassed and childish way. The comment provided nothing. (For instance, if you want to go to /usr/local/some/very/deep/folder, you can type Ctrl+L and go there, just as in ROX you can type /.) If you think there’s an actual reason not to do something, say so, don’t just say you hate it.
(And oh: The presence of OK and Apply buttons on Windows confuses me. They’re just trying to immitate some previous windowing system. Why should I have to explicitly say I want to change something? But more seriously, having got used to it, I keep forgetting you have to choose apply on Windows and I wonder why the new settings haven’t taken affect. I’m just used to the system I use. Such is life.)
I just want to say (repeat ?) that if you want to *browse* to /usr/share/whatever using Nautilus, you can open the *navigational* Nautilus. It’s very easy: whether right-click on a folder and choose “browse this folder” or launch “browse filesystem” from the main menu.
It’s that easy…
The pro-spatial arguments are far away from just claiming to be more intuitive to new computer users. The main advantage is that it can make people more efficient because it plays to our natural strengths (spatial recognition, etc).
While that might sound very theoretical, I know that it works because it made me more productive and also made my desktop usage a heck of a lot more enjoyable. In fact, I can’t remember to ever have used a desktop as much as I do these days (as opposed to just using a fancy window manager and a panel to launch applications).
The Amiga workbench used spatial file browsing. I remember that most of the Amiga users had Directory Opus installed and it instead of the workbench for file manipulation. In my opinion, having used an Amiga for almost ten years, spatial browsing is inconvenient, more difficult and not as powerful as convential browsing.
And not being able to enter a path in a fileselector without pressing some key to pop up some other dialog is one of the stupiest things I ever heard. A typical line widget does not use much space anyway, it is convenient for most users to always have it there and please don’t tell me that a line widget where you can enter the path makes it more complicated to use a file requester.
And in my opinion it is very nice to have the most important button on the left, because people (at least in the US and European countries) read from left to right and so they will read this button first. And I don’t like instant apply at all. What if I play with some settings and I decide that I don’t like them? If there is a cancel-button I can just press it and don’t have to worry to find my old settings again.
I think usability is a good thing, but one can go too far. There is no point in changing things just to change them. Why not just stick with the way Windows is doing things, as long as there is no BIG advantage of doing something different. 95% of the world is using Windows, most new Linux users are coming from Windows and the Windows GUI is not that bad, anyway. I think, people should really be more pragmatic here.
each version of gnome is more and more “empty” and desolated… i want icons, flags, menus, buttons…
look at those spatial nautilus windows…they are depressing, well looking at them i have the feeling that the only thing i can do is browse…where are the toolbars for copy, cut and paste? and for which reason i would whish to have 2000+ windows open on my desktop?? the workflow is much more smooth with the tree view of the filesystem ala konqeror/explorer, this spatial concept has been abandoned by apple to…
Excuse the dumb questions, but how exactly is spatial Nautilus different from for example Win98 (or later). As far as I can understand, both open new windows for directories.
It has more features which make navigating spatially more useful. You can close all parent windows in one click for instance. It does remember the settings for all your folders. And the spatial nautilus is sort of independent from teh navigational one. You can use both at the same time, or which ever one you prefer. With windows, it was either open in new window all the time, or open in the same window all the time.
I agree.
Gnome will simplify itself into oblivion.
They’ve been cutting features and functionality for whom? Windows converts? No, Windows converts will end up running KDE because they are used to a wide variaty of software and features from Windows. They are used to multiple toolbars and customizable toolbars and a decent file selector.
The only familiar “feature” that Gnome is bringing is registry based configuration that’s very familiar to Windows users, i.e. get a corrupted registry, your system is hosed, start reinstallin.
Those that don’t learn from history are bound to repeat the same mistakes. Text based config files are the best feature of Linux and insure that a system can be easily administered and easily repaired. Registry based systems are nothing but a nightmare.
The spacial browsing argument doesn’t hold when a little logic is used.
In the big article about spacial browsing the reasoning was that people remember 3D objects and an analogy was made to a room with some objects that a human has memorized the position of, like light switch etc.
Well, that’s all fine, if you’re dealing with a few objects but when navigating *nix file system, one can easily find 10,000 files in /usr/bin instead of one light swith, one desk lamp, one phone etc. So spacial browsing my ass. Have the righ tools for the right job. Spacial browsing is not the right concept for computers with a lot of files. A real file manager is the right tool.
And having to start a bunch of servers just to use one gtk program is a bad desigh in my opinion too. That kind of design will come to haunt us later on when software gets more sofisticated and complex.
Components should be modular and independent of each other so that when one link in the chain breaks it doesn’t take down the rest with it.
I think you would be expecting too much of any file manage to try manage /usr/bin with ANY file manager. That is not logical. The file manager is meant to provide a graphical view of your files, and it only really works well when you have a few files in a folder. Honestly, how many of us actually ever just navigate to C:/windows/System32 with Explorer. This is why GNOME has a picture manager for jpegs and pngs, and this is the reason you probably use a proper IDE for web development. A file manager like Nautilus is general purpose, not specialised for tasks where it does not make sense to use a file manager.
Besides, you still CAN use nautilus with the old method. Nothing has changed there. So if anything, you just have MORE options, the Windows way, and the Nautilus Spatial way. Of course you only memorize a few things, which is exactly the situation most computer users find themselves in. They have a documents directory, a Music directory, a pictures one and so on. Not a thousand barely recognizable ones.
About GConf. It is not like the registry. It is an easy way to simplify configuration, but if you go into your .gconf files, you will see it contains just a bit collection of xml files in a hierarchy of folders. It works just like old text file configuration but with standardized structure to the files and standard ways of accessing and writing data. It’s the best of both worlds, really, in that respect.
“each version of gnome is more and more “empty” and desolated… i want icons, flags, menus, buttons…”
Then you are not GNOME’s target! So go use KDE or something. Nobody’s forcing you to use GNOME. There are plenty of people who *do* like GNOME’s direction. GNOME is for those people, not for you.
“I agree.
Gnome will simplify itself into oblivion.”
No it won’t. You only say this because you’re not GNOME’s target.
“They’ve been cutting features and functionality for whom? Windows converts? No, Windows converts will end up running KDE because they are used to a wide variaty of software and features from Windows. They are used to multiple toolbars and customizable toolbars and a decent file selector.”
You’re right: GNOME’s not for Windows converts. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. GNOME is for people who want simplicity. Just because you don’t like simplicity doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t!
This is a classic example of facistic force-your-opinion-down-to-others’-throat.
“The only familiar “feature” that Gnome is bringing is registry based configuration that’s very familiar to Windows users, i.e. get a corrupted registry, your system is hosed, start reinstallin.”
Sorry but you are completely wrong. GConf is nothing like the Windows registry, only the idea is the same (“centralized place for storing configuration”).
1. Unlike Windows, GConf doesn’t store everything in a huge, error-phrone file. Instead, it stores things in a lot of small XML files. Each GConf “folder” is stored in a seperate file in the filesystem. If one of those files are corrupted, you only lose a *very* small part of your configuration.
2. GConf supports change notifications. This allows features like instant apply.
3. Only unimportant preferences are stored in GConf, and nothing else. Your email addressbook for example is not stored in GConf!
GConf is much better than the registry.
“And having to start a bunch of servers just to use one gtk program is a bad desigh in my opinion too.”
As opposed to, say, dcopserver?
And how’s having something in a server worse than having the same thing in a library? In either case, you’re screwed if you need certain functionality and the server or library crashes.
…I have found that if ever something were to go wrong with your configuration, simply deleting your (the users) gconf database will usually work well. You only lose your configuration. You do not get apps not working because it is all per user stuff.
I want to get 2.6, but on which Distro? An aging RH 9.0? Retrofit core 1, test core 2? The others are lean toward KDE : ( Do they have it for Debian?
Gnome needs it’s own software installer-uninstaller. This is what is needed to rule the desktop.
Synaptic can be included. It works great, but are RPMs really the way we want to go?
I want open Distro dedicated to Gnome from the ground up with no easliy cuuruptible corporate steering committe.
full ack!
There are many distros that are DE agnostic. You might want to check them out.
I really disliked the old MacOS spatial finder — and I suspect I will dislike the new Nautilus just as much. There are two problems with ‘spatial file management’.
The first is the cause of many a heart flutter: open a window, scroll down to the last icon, because there are more icons than fit the window, and you need that file. Close the finder window. Next time you open the finder window, do you remember that you had scrolled down all the way last time? I don’t, and I get something horribly near to a hear attack thinking that I have accidentally deleted the rest of the files. Ouch.
The second problem is clutter. My desk is a disorganized surface area with stacks of papers, books, folders, binders, notes, pen cases, mice, tablets and formerly cats.
My computer desktop is a neatly organized work surface where whatever clutter I produce is quickly put in alphabetic order. The computer keeps order for me; a spatial finder makes me live in chaos not only on my desk, but also on my desktop.
“The first is the cause of many a heart flutter: open a window, scroll down to the last icon, because there are more icons than fit the window, and you need that file. Close the finder window. Next time you open the finder window, do you remember that you had scrolled down all the way last time? I don’t, and I get something horribly near to a hear attack thinking that I have accidentally deleted the rest of the files. Ouch.”
Well, that never happened to me and I’m using it for quite a while now. Can’t be that common.
“The second problem is clutter. My desk is a disorganized surface area with stacks of papers, books, folders, binders, notes, pen cases, mice, tablets and formerly cats.”
The browser is still there if you need it to sort your chaos. The spatial representation gives you possibilities to work with your files (in a very direct manner) which simply weren’t there before (on GNOME or the Unix desktop in general).
I agree that a computer should assist us in sorting our mess, but I don’t agree that browsers are the best answer to this problem. I want my computer to sort my chaos when I’m asking it to do it and I want my computer to find me what I’m looking for, but I don’t want to be limited to a viewing device to scroll through all my data. While that helps to reduce chaos, it doesn’t make me more productive.
Definitively, I don’t like the spatial thing. A couple of reasons:
o It clutters the desktop with nautilus’ windows. You need to open a lot of windows to go to a site, and the “close all window parents” is just a hack to fix that
o There’s no text on the window that will tell you where you’re. And join this to the previous statement “It clutters the desktop with nautilus’ windows”: You can have five windows and there’s no way on earth you can know what fielsystem directory is representing each window. I mean, how can I know if I’m in $HOME or in $HOME/doc? With the previous nautilus there’s the address bar and you just see where you’re.
o Direction buttons: Can someone explain why on earth a “spatial interface” can’t have a “up” “down”, “backward”, “forward”, or even more important, a “HOME” button? Why should I waste time switching between windows (windows that I don’t know what they’re representing, remember the previous point) when I can press a button and be done with that?
Even more, what is that “connect to server” menu entry crap? What is exactly wrong with typing “ftp.gnome.org” in a address bar, or “start-here://”, or….all the things that gnome-vfs could represent like “usb-drive://” (which means that nautilus could be transparently used as explorer or browser when you want, like the windows guys did with explorer and that the KDE guys have imitated so well with kparts? Instead of that, the nautilus guys did a menu entry where you’ll write “www.gnome.org, a *icon* will appear in the “My computer” entry, and that you have to UMOUNT?!? before being able to delete it)
Definitively, I don’t like spatial nautilus. It’s not that it’s a bad idea – matter of taste – but *FULL* of basic UI errors that you can make in a file browser – no matter of it’s spatial or no. Gnome, I don’t recognize you, where’s the HIG spirit?
Been done to death, but I’ll chip in anyways.
o When I create a link to a folder on the filesystem and put that on the Desktop, I don’t get a ‘browse folder’ context menu. It’s probably not possible at all, and so double-clicking gives me this bizzare single window per folder mode.
o I’d love to have an option to switch to browse mode for the current folder from *within* Nautilus, without having to edit a pref via GConf.
What happened to backwards compatibility? At least behavior wise. That too, for a component that is used as often as a file manager.
I like GNOME and I’m sticking with it, but I hope this aberration goes away in the next release.
But whatever they did, Nautilus is a hell of a lot faster and opens up instantenously. Nicely done.
I am sorry if someone said this but editing gconf to get the “old” nautilus is not needed. Just type “nautilus –no-desktop –browser” and you have the non-spatial nautilus file browser. Doesn’t seem hard to me, especially if you make a menu entry (which already exists as “browse filesystem”) or an icon on the panel or desktop.
>Epiphany is a top browser, which is capable of all
>but the most demanding tasks
Maybe – if they’ve fixed the terrible “search”- style bookmark lookup they used in Fedore Core 1. Clearly the originator of this idea never actually bookmarked much stuff, or he’d have noticed it doesn’t scale well.
> Maybe – if they’ve fixed the terrible “search”- style bookmark lookup they used in Fedore Core 1.
Hmm.. i haven’t used Fedora but the Epiphany i have been using for, a year maybe? Has had “Bookmarks” menu entry that works like with the other browsers. And you can use the addressbar to “search” for bookmarks.
> Clearly the originator of this idea never actually bookmarked much stuff, or he’d have noticed it doesn’t scale well.
I use the addressbar bookmarking almost exclusively as i know the titles of my most visited sites, and those that i don’t remember i browse through the “Bookmarks” menu. You did know that you don’t have to remember the exact bookmark name for example to get bookmark “Gnome tips and tricks” you’ll just type “tips” and it will find that bookmark (and list others that include “tips” in them). I have over 100 bookmarks. And yes, i should clean up my bookmarks; too many hobbies, too many bookmarks.
Michael Thaler, spatial Nautilus is there for people who want it. Browser Nauti is there for people what prefer that. If you were capable of using Directory Opus on an Amiga, I’m sure you’re cappable of switching to the browser Nauti. Personally, I prefer a decent spatial fm to a decent browser fm. I can’t comment on whether Nauti is decent at either, though; I haven’t used 2.6 yet.
I can’t comment on the absense of the text field; I haven’t used GTK+ 2.4 yet. I only ever used it in GTK+ because it was so much more useful than the rest. When I used to use Windows, I only point-and-clicked.
As to the direction… Well, I guess that’s up to you, if you insist on reading graphical items like sentences. Windows puts its buttons on the bottom right at times, and I tend to read them backwards because I will read a dialog box in a circle. I guess Windows gets that wrong?
As to instant apply, I’ll be damned if I can work out how you know you don’t like a changed setting if you haven’t actually changed it yet.
As to Windows, if I wanted to use Windows, well, I would, wouldn’t I? Or, failing that, XPde. There’s no reason to be gratuitously different, true, but there’s no reason not to try to do different things. If something turns out to be a horrible failue, well, I’m sure our friends at Gnome well recognise that and fix it up.
BTW, I will point out that it’s not necessary for instant apply settings to lose the state of the world before the change. ROX uses instant apply, but it has a Revert button, so that not only can you see the new settings in action, you can decide you don’t like them! Try changing settings in Windows and pressing ‘Apply’ then ‘Cancel’ and see how reverted your changes become…
Did anyone notice how slow gEdit gets after about 100 lines of text?
I am opening a file here with 102400 lines of text. No problems. (its the Fedora kernel-config-i686 file). Maybe my computer is just fast. 😕
😕 ? that’s an odd smily. What’s it meant to mean?
meybe you like this one better: =¿.
only 6 errors/problems to go. lol
Installation was painless. Making the bootdisk generated an error (out of space, I think). I couldn’t properly read the error as it was quickly erased by another screen.
I found a neat installation guide on the Net. It said to make 3 partitions to /root, /usr, home. I just made one “/” and a swap instead.
I added a user account, added LILO and an Windows XP option. There are some errors in the messages before the login prompt. I have no idea what to do aboot those. If I could read them, I could use google to help out.
StartX generates a couple of errors. Xscreensaver is choking. Libcdda isn’t found, so Nautilus doesn’t come up. I am left with the 2.4 Gnome panels. The web browsers don’t seem to work.
Pretty soon, I’ll get to Gnome 2.6 *sigh*
I’d like to use words clean, consistent, timeless and stylish, among others, to describe what makes me like the look of Gnome UI. I have many times wondered, how can a community effort like Gnome produce a visual design of such high quality, that it leaves the commercial competion behind. Gnome really is above anything else that I have seen to this day, in this respect. I think that Matt put it well in his post, when he said “…i like the minimalistic approach, while still keeping a nice amount of eye-candy and functionality”.
I haven’t had the opportunity of trying 2.6 yet and thus can’t tell my personal view of the spacial browser (Maynards description of it was so well written, though, that I almost feel like having tried it already), but I got a feeling, that some people commented it without having really tried to adjust them selves to a new (new for at least implementation) concept. When one is used to work with a tool and learnd how to be productive using it, it’s only natural that when trying a new tool, work doesn’t start to flow from the beginning. We easily call a new way of doing something bad, when it may just be a question of having to adjust ourselvs – which always takes a little time. When we instead of resisting new, take a few steps back and try the new path, whe may well find ourselves having an easier walk. But I shall not say more before having tried 2.6 myself 🙂
[i]I think you would be expecting too much of any file manage to try manage /usr/bin with ANY file manager. That is not logical. The file manager is meant to provide a graphical view of your files, and it only really works well when you have a few files in a folder. Honestly, how many of us actually ever just navigate to C:/windows/System32 with Explorer. This is why GNOME has a picture manager for jpegs and pngs, and this is the reason you probably use a proper IDE for web development. A file manager like Nautilus is general purpose, not specialised for tasks where it does not make sense to use a file manager.
Besides, you still CAN use nautilus with the old method. Nothing has changed there. So if anything, you just have MORE options, the Windows way, and the Nautilus Spatial way. Of course you only memorize a few things, which is exactly the situation most computer users find themselves in. They have a documents directory, a Music directory, a pictures one and so on. Not a thousand barely recognizable ones.[i]
Well, I was actually only refering to the spacial nautilus.
The listing mode of Nautilus works ok even for large directories like /usr/bin although I do have a fast computer.
And I go to /windows/system32 all the time when trouble shooting a system etc. But you’re right, most users don’t go there very often. However, some user folders can get large too, like image or mp3 collections, so good file manager that can quickly display a lot of files is still very useful.
Gnome 2.4 did not have this possibility
> Metacity has a new ‘reduced resources’ mode, which
> encompasses previous options like disabling the animations.
> But in the interests of providing visual feedback as much as
> possible, when you drag a window for example, in reduced
> resources mode, you get a frame instead of the whole window
> and its contents being dragged along. Unfortunately, I could
> not get a screenshot of this. It refuses to come out on the
> shot.
Of course in a ‘reduced resources’ mode you don’t want to repaint window contents as you move it.
You cannot get a screenshot because the X Server is grabbed (XGrabServer – say, the X server doesn’t get events and doesn’t repaint while it is grabbed). This is done this way so there’s no need to repaint windows under the frame (repaint meaning asking the app to repaint the window). This is standard practice.
>> Maybe – if they’ve fixed the terrible “search”- style
>> bookmark lookup they used in Fedore Core 1.
>Hmm.. i haven’t used Fedora but the Epiphany i have been
>using for, a year maybe? Has had “Bookmarks” menu entry
>that
>works like with the other browsers. And you can use the
>addressbar to “search” for bookmarks.
No, it doesn’t work like other browsers. Other browsers use a multilevel schemem, my copy of Epiphany was single-level-only. That doesn’t scale.
> I use the addressbar bookmarking almost exclusively as i
> know the titles of my most visited sites, and those that
> i don’t remember i browse through the “Bookmarks” menu.
> You did know that you don’t have to remember the exact
> bookmark name for example to get bookmark “Gnome tips
> and tricks” you’ll just type “tips” and it will find
> that bookmark (and list others that include “tips” in
> them). I have over 100 bookmarks.
You’ve gotta be kidding. You only have 100 bookmarks, and you claim your experience shows the bookmarking scheme scales? Your list practically fits on the screen! I have way over a thousand bookmarks, and no, their page titles usually don’t have a **** thing to do with the content that caught my eye. For example, the page title “default.htm” does not explain why http://www.stopabductions.com/ is in my “humor” list.
I have gnome 2.6 and I love it
the only thing I have a problem with is the way nautilus acts with a new window opening on every click and no adress bar
can I change it back?
thanks in advance
Guy