“Project GoneME is the first attempt to try moving the GNOME Desktop into a new direction. As a long years contributor and ex-GNOME Foundation member I got quite unhappy with the new direction that some core decision takers have chosen without further feedback with the community or their participants” he claims while in search for similar-thinking devs to join him. More here.
Ali Akcaagac Attempts to Fork Gnome
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It so needs speed improvements.
As for usability, how about the save dialogs? Right now they suck in terms of hierarchy, and you have to click a button to get the whole pane open. Plus it doesn’t stick once you do that.
you sound a little upset you’re not in the foundation anymore.
I think he has a point regarding esound, but much of his other reasoning seems somewhat flawed. Like regarding KHTML – he talks about XUL shouldn’t be in the desktop – and it isn’t. Both epiphany and galeon are written in GTK+, not XUL.
This is just a one headed attempt just like freekde. Its a total mess which shows no actual improvements. like people say show me the code
It so needs speed improvements.
Can you be any more vague?
As for usability, how about the save dialogs? Right now they suck in terms of hierarchy, and you have to click a button to get the whole pane open. Plus it doesn’t stick once you do that.
And what is your remedy, oh usability expert?
Let’s see…not have to click a button to open the whole pane, and have your last setting stick?
Wow, that was hard to figure out.
This is oGalaxyo.. He’s known to cause seriously heated debates in the Gnome and KDE communities; and he has also made some seriously childish comments towards OSNews and Eugenia in the past. He’s even been banned due to tampering with OSNews poll results if I recall correctly.
My point? He is a decent programmer, but he’s very unstable in his ethics toward OS and desktop development. I wouldn’t trust his fork to save my life.
I mean about khtml
After reviewing his points, I disagree with almost every single one. Obviously, I’d like gnome to improve, but not in the way he suggests. esd should be removed though. Guess this is one project that I won’t be following.
oGalaxyo, don’t let the GConf editor fools you! It’s just UI that looks like Windows Registry, but inside code is a big difference. If you are a programming, you are supposed to know.
Althought, good luck w/ your project!
I’d like to see a Gnome+ or something along those lines. Have improvements to the file manager, have more config dialogues, and more full featured applications.
I suppose the key in my mind is that Gnome goes the route of being the default, and then you have a collection of more advanced apps that also will integrate and work perfectly.
However, I don’t think Galaxy is the guy to do it, and the complaints that he mentions have largely already been addressed.
Half of you haven’t done anything or anything near what this guy has done for free.
——-
by this logic users shouldnt complain about developers at all. regardless of what he developed if he doesnt do it right users will complain and there is no way you can stop that
Care to say why? Personally, I’d rather wait for the separation of the core browser and the interface in Mozilla than using a browser based on KHTML. I never had a good experience with Konq’s rendering. Then again, I didn’t used it since last year…
Ok, so now instead of having resources split 2 ways you have a 3 way split ?
Honestly, diversity is great.. but being bad at alot of stuff isnt particularly better than being damn good at one thing.
Focus people.
In KDE 3.3.3, KHTML has improved with updates from safari. Its truely rendering rivials mozilla.
Is a tree. I’ve worked on one, but its really abandoned at the moment.
Right now, I just don’t really have the free time. And it needs to be done in C with the nautilus libs to really work right.
I don’t find spatial to be a huge annoyance. But then, my mouse is extremely easy to middle click, and I’m used to doing it since I use it extensively in web browsing as well. Also, spatial rocks when you’re just using the keyboard.
Ma bad, wiseone, some of us don’t have 3000 by 2000 resolution monitors? And why on earth should the last setting stick? What makes you think I want to save using the last setting?
What makes you think I don’t? I have a reso of 1280×1024 and I have to resize that dialog almost every single time I use it. And, I usually have to expand it to show directories too.
Sounds like we need a configuration option. I don’t care if it’s gconf supported only or not. Just because this guy comes off like an a** doesn’t mean his points are invalid.
Where are your patches, oh Sherlock? If you can’t walk the walk, don’t talk the talk.
Yes, because if you’re not a programmer, you have absolutely no room to criticize. Not that the GNOME guys wanted the users’ criticism or anything.
I don’t understand the argument against gconf, other than stating that it is a “Windows registry” for Gnome. Could someone fill me in on some of the arguments against gconf, outside of the one aforementioned?
As a brief note, I’ve used it, and I find it convenient as a developer. I simply take on the directory, set, get, do whatever, and it just works for me.
While I completely think he is off his rockers with his reasoning, I will avoid simply flaming back, and understand that he is only doing what he thinks is best.
Anyways, the first thing he releases is button order. Now, button order has gotten a lot of lip service from geeks, but let me share a small story.
I have introduced the Gnome desktop on some of the computers in my office, and I have not had one case of Windows user confused with the button order. Not one. Now granted, we are not a large office, but about a half dozen people have used these machines for more than a day to get real work done, and button order was not a problem.
Some of the questions that I had to answer:
* How do I setup my email?
* Where’s Internet Explorer/Firefox (Yes, I have converted some of the sales staff to Firefox! =)).
* Where’s solitaire?
* Where’s Word? (OpenOffice was used, and I didn’t hear any complaints)
I am not trying to suggest that this is a scientific study, but rather to point out that button order is NOT as big a deal as we make it out to be. It’s something UI “gurus” and geeks like to discuss, all of us searching for empiracal evidence of the one true way.
So, if his first contribution in this project is to rearrange the button order, I feel as if the project will really accomplish nothing. There are numerious issues besides button order that could be improved, and would have a far greater impact.
On a side note: he has spammed both the OSNews and Slashdot comment areas with the same posting about his project. Spam is spam, and spammers are scum.
it’s hard enough to get web designers to make sure their websites are ok in mozilla as well as IE…there’s no way they will think about making sure websites work in khtml which isn’t available in Windows.
Mainly the criticisms of gconf are based on the main interface for manipulating it. However, considering that it is just an interface to it, there are others that can be used.
http://gtweakui.sourceforge.net/screen.php
For instance, this would make a better ‘advanced’ config tool, although developers would still need the much more detailed options presented with the current interface.
Its my understanding that most of the desired options are already in the standard tools as of 2.7.
I also have no trouble hand editing gconf files with nano.
”
Everybody knows Spatial is counter-productive and a huge annoyance. Yet they still went ahead and implemented this majorly rejected way of using file folders. Spatial Nautilus needs to get buried as a disabled option in some preference menu when GNOME reaches 2.8″
stop putting opinions as facts. tons of people using classic macs or beos used and liked it. so do i. so for me its very good. you have the option to just choose browse filesystem already from the application menu. gnome 2.8 will have the option to turn it off completely. so stop whining
Please tell me this guy is ESL or something (English as a Second Language for those of you not in the know).
Yes, he is, as far as I know.
However, the remark about spelling errors in the text was unnecessary, wasn’t it?
@ arielb
Safari is using KHTML. And my online banking works with both Konqueror and Safari.
Your argument doesn’t hold up.
“And why on earth should the last setting stick? What makes you think I want to save using the last setting?”
Dude. Grab a can of coke and put it in the far right corner of your desk. Now turn around so you cannot see it. Stay like that for about 2 seconds and then turn back. Whoa – its position stuck!
If you do not know why a setting being “sticky” is good usability then please go read.
I was actually being a little too sarcastic with regards to the resolution issue. Everyone is going to have an opinion on how software should operate. And developers can’t please everyone.
I never find the save dialogue to be an inconvenience, because I just save to the desktop, and when I’m done with the document I’m working with, I can always move it to where I would like it to reside permanently(drag the file from the desktop to “documents”, “pics”, “movies” or whatever).
So I use the desktop as my temporary saving bed. I never used to work like that, but I adjusted. And I find my new adjustment a lot more productive. I also find that spacial nautilus has made me reevaluate the way I use the desktop and organize my file.
I’m a command line junkie. I never used to use file managers. They all sucked. But with spatial nautilus, I find my self using it all the time. My point is, little adjustments have to be made when you use any software. A lot of software wouldn’t magically fit your needs. Well, I haven’t found one that those for me, yet.
I have to adjust when my manner of working when I use Windows, Mac, KDE and even GNOME. That’s just reality.
Yes, because if you’re not a programmer, you have absolutely no room to criticize. Not that the GNOME guys wanted the users’ criticism or anything.
You do. But you don’t have be jerk about it. Especially when you don’t know what it entails. It’s not like your father hired programmers to write a safe dialogue for you.
@ Anonymous
stop putting opinions as facts. tons of people using classic macs or beos used and liked it. so do i. so for me its very good. you have the option to just choose browse filesystem already from the application menu. gnome 2.8 will have the option to turn it off completely. so stop whining
I’m putting opinions as facts? No, the majority of people made sure that spatial design went away. And that’s a fact.
Name me a successful operating system that went from default Browse mode to Spatial mode in the last 20 years? None. All left spatial and went to browse mode. Why? Because spatial mode is flawed and counter-productive. Why do you think MDI mode and Tabs were invented?
I think the Amiga OSes (OS3.X, OS4 and MorphOS) are the only OSes that are still using spatial mode.
Though I’m not a GNOME User and even this wouldn’t make me one can see where this guy is coming from. To me the he points out some (well know) issues and clearly states that those are matter of oppinion – either you like GNOME’s new direction – or you don’t.
He’s refering a lot to ‘bloat’ and ‘fancy technology’ – I think he’s talking about KDE here, and since I don’t feel it’s bloated and actually think fancy technology is nice I’ll maybe only be trying GoneME (if it gets packaged some day) to see how it does – not to use it day to day.
Otherwise i agree very much and hope he doesn’t lose interest or motivation half the way so there might still be the glimpse of more unification concerning GNOME/GoneME and the rest-of-the-world (excluding MacOS that is
).
I strongly agree on his explanations about the button-order and would like to see this done to. There are gnome apss that are usefull and I don’t see why I shouldn’t use them on KDE – only that they button ordering confuses at times.
Oh, that’s probably gonna raise a “No, the rest-of-the-world is wrong!” argument.
Dude, wake up! There is a stack difference between reality and software applications. Applications that try too hard to mimic reality often fail.
It’s not everytime a user wants to save their research paper in their music directory.
“I’m putting opinions as facts? No, the majority of people made sure that spatial design went away. And that’s a fact. ”
wrong. how do you say its a fact?. because a few load people decide to bitch and moan about it?. what other statistics do you have
“Why do you think MDI mode and Tabs were invented? ”
mdi sucks and how do you propose to implement tabs instead of spatial interface. demonstrate
Is it really necessary to argue about such fundamental issues everytime there is a GNOME or KDE article linked at OSNews?
I mean isn’t it possible that there are just different _oppinions_ and there’s no sense it arguing about what’s fact and what’s not?
Seriously in my view there are simply people who like e.g. spatiality and are productive with it and there are people who don’t… what’s so upsetting about this?
Same goes for many other interface related issues.
And if there are some people who don’t like the way GNOME handles certain tasks but like it otherwise and have a very clear vision of how it should be (to them!) – then fine, why not fork it?
Btw. telling “mdi sucks” is not the most “factual” statement there has been in recent years either…
‘”Btw. telling “mdi sucks” is not the most “factual” statement there has been in recent years either…”
it isnt. i didnt claim it was. i can accept opinions if they are presented as such. just dont claim YOUR opinions as facts or even that it is the majority
I agree with some of his suggestions, there’s lots of dependencies and quite a bit of bloat for not much gain, but his TODOs are mostly cosmetic.
The main problem with Gnome is that it doesn’t have a good component and IPC system compared to KParts and DCOP. Bonobo has been a failure. I use Gnome almost exclusively these days for various reasons, but it still just seems like a bunch of random apps in contrast to an integrated desktop like KDE has.
Coincidently, I was thinking about a Gnome fork earlier today while reading a Mono thread here, but my vision was of Novell forking Gnome and using Mono as a core component.
I realize Mono is based on emca ect… but MS still has a long history of litegation ect. Although a great concept, Mono legally scares me. One of those too good to be true and waiting for the other shoe to drop things I guess.
As for Spacial…I honestly tried Gnome 2.6, and to be honest although its usable and i can get used to it. I did not find it at all intuitive. bring up my home, then say to your self..where is /home at…not anyplace in sight at all..lower left corner a little button. Yes i found it, yes i used it ect.. On the other hand if you are a keyboard junky or a CMD junky then great and well. Those people tend to be the ones who are FAR above normal user status and well into Pro User status. Yes i can navigate by CMD…and at times prefer it. Then again for light tasks i prefer a Tree that shows me my file system so i can just jump there real fast and do what i wanted. To each their own.
Now as for the ESL…you did not read. He states very clearly on his web page he is ESL, and most anyone would recognize that by default.
As for the button order..he stated Very Clearly WHY it was important. It is a standards issue, not really so much a user issue.
Far to many of you seem intent on pure fame wars. Many of you, to be blunt, left you IQ at the door when you entered this thread.
Peace
I’m not sure what exactly you guys are running, but I have a 700mhz P3 Thinkpad X-series with a 256MB of RAM and I run Debian with GNOME and have found absolutely no speed problems. It is very comparable to how Win2k ran on this machine before I picked it up and slapped Debian on it.
Some things are a bit faster actually, particularly opening a large directory of images with Nautilus and thumbnails as compared to Windows Explorer.
I always have 4 workspaces: one running Straw (rss aggregator), one running Firefox with 8 tabs or so, one running a gvim session with several buffers for various projects and another with a bunch of gnome-terminals for various things, as well as a sticky irssi window across all workspaces. Even with all this running I find my machine runs very, very well. Much nicer than with Win2k and that many apps running.
Certainly I could not have said this about GNOME 1.5 years or more ago — it was definitely slower and less robust.
I’m sure I’ll be accused of being a ‘GNOME apologist’, but I think those accusers (and those who say GNOME is slow) are people who haven’t used GNOME lately. There is a reason ‘GNOME apologists’ are popping up left and right these days — because GNOME has made huge strides in usability, stability and speed within the last year or so.
I do actually agree with most of the points that he makes but I think he’s taking actions which are too extreme and the remainder are just plain stupid.
Spatial Nautilus: I see no real reason to eliminate its presence entirely as I’ve gotten used to it but I would like to see the mouse buttons switched at least. Left-clicking is much more natural and with the observed fact that the majority of people open a file manager window to browse, this seems like simple logic to me.
GConf: There’s a very good reason why I dislike GConf — decentralized configuration. Why can’t I change the label of the computer icon from within a desktop tab in Nautilus instead? Or by just right-clicking and renaming for that matter? Although I will admit that I haven’t researched the true nature of GConf and if it does indeed possess greater meaning, then I would expect it be used for that purpose, rather than hiding essential configuration options from the user.
Overall I think that the GNOME developers have to listen much more closely to user opinions and until they do, I fear that the DE will lose more users than it gains.
Wrawrat writes
Care to say why?
The reason I think it would be better for GNOME to use the khtml engine is because I think it would be better to share technology. Actually I wish they would share more tech.
Although the other comments you said are valid, because of Safari, and the KDE team the browsing engine can only get better.
If GNOME devs could get involved in that process, it can become even better.
I don’t expect the core engine for Mozilla to be seperated any time soon. I asked at the Mozillazine forums and this was their reply.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=82722&highlight=&sid=…
I am still waiting for gecko to become “smaller and simpler”
Can epiphany be built in GNOME without the requirement of Mozilla being installed?
“The main problem with Gnome is that it doesn’t have a good component and IPC system compared to KParts and DCOP”
the freedesktop replacement called dbus is being integrated completely into gnome now and might as well take over dcop in kde 4. its pretty similiar to dcop and designed to be desktop neutral and transition would be smooth if kde chooses that. bonobo isnt being used as much as kparts maybe we need a dparts?
GNOME needs a new direction anyway IMO. Maybe this fork will influence the main project in a better one or even provide a better alternative.
Best: “What spatial needs is a tree.”
Agreed.
I guess the current spatial mode might be ok and even useful for me (remembering window positions and size, new windows / folder, and also allowing me to close the previous windows easily when opening new ones to avoid window clutter) – if only the UI would make it easier and faster to go from folder A to folder B, what ever the folder structure is and where ever the folders are located. Now I feel it is a bit too much work – especially when you very well know that you could achieve the same task much faster in navigational mode.
I haven’t yet figured out any other way to do that folder navigation (or what ever you call it in the spatial mode) fast except a tree view in GUI (are there other ways?), and CLI on the other hand.
Could a nice comprehensive tree view and the spatial mode perhaps be combined in some rational way? I don’t see why not. Or does someone have better ideas how to fast go from folder A to folder B (or folder /etc/X/Y/Z or what ever the case may be)? I wouldn’t mind if it would be an add-on or even a 3rd party hack either, as long as it works. Anybody who does it, gets my thanks.
“Best: “What spatial needs is a tree.”
Agreed”
for people who need a clue. a spatial with a tree isnt spatial anymore. its navigational. if you want that choose browse filesystem from the application menu,
I really hope this guy has success!
for people who need a clue. a spatial with a tree isnt spatial anymore. its navigational. if you want that choose browse filesystem from the application menu
Umm, well, maybe? I did say that it could be an add-on. Also I was just trying to be positive about the basic good points of the spatial mode… (there are some)
But if there really are only two camps in this issue: navigational or spatial camp, I guess that I belong to the navigational camp then. And so do most people I know, whether experienced or not. Also, I have given lots of hand to hand PC help to unexperienced people, and they don’t seem to have too severe problems understanding the navigational mode.
A quesation: wouldn’t you spatial people ever want to use a tree to ease the managemnt your files and folders??
Another thing: If we stay at the spatial mode, I wouldn’t mind if I could change the way the mouse buttons work for me when opening folders, so that I could change the default middle-button-double-click (close parent folder) to left click, and vice versa. Or is it possible currently? Why would I want that? Well, guess what, because in current spatial Nautilus I probably use the (more difficult) middle/scroll-button-mouse-click much more than the normal left button-double-click nowadays… Does continuous scroll/middle-button clicking mean ease of use? I doubt it.
Sorry, but if XFce4 would have a better file manager (XFFM), I would probably already prefer it to GNOME/Nautilus.
The so-called spatial Nautilus is only semi-spational even now. Guess why?
choose browse filesystem from the application menu
Not intuitive and fast enough currently, and hardly easy to use especially for newbies. Why couldn’t it be made easier?
But maybe moving from the spatial mode to the navigational mode is the only real cure to this issue??
Actually, Dave Camp (a pretty active nautilus developer) has considered/is considering adding a tree view to spatial. Apparently he doesn’t think it breaks spatial. Maybe we’ll see it in a future release.
Why do you think MDI mode and Tabs were invented?
I always thought MDI was specifically invented to annoy people so much when trying to multitask under Windows that they’d just stick to one-app-at-a-time, and cover up Windows’ dismal multitasking capabilities at the time.
1. Can I change the Buttonorder with a GConfKey?
2. How does removing a lot of bloat and integrating KHTML fit together?
3. Is esound used anymore?
I like GNOME the way it is and its direction, there is no issue with speed, Gnome 2.6 is still much faster than KDE, but there is one thing I don’t want to happen to gnome and thats mono!
Seriously, if a developer thinks xml files are a bad idea, he could write a backend that uses flat ini type ascii text files and it would be accepted as an alternative system. No problem.
What’s wrong with esd? Works really great on my comp.
You need some kind of sound daemon with gstreamer, what else than esd would you use??
Everyting can play simultaneously (including OSS apps), I don’t really know how it works.
And mdi truly sucks.
>A quesation: wouldn’t you spatial people ever want to use a
>tree to ease the managemnt your files and folders??
I don’t know if I’m “spatial” (~180cm/70kg), but no,
I haven’t touched or wanted to touch navigational
nautilus since spatial was introduced. I actually have
changed my Windows configurations to open in new windows
and hidden the location bars. That hasn’t helped much,
though.
Last time I used a tree structure to manage my files was
with Dos and, a little, Windows 3.11. I used it a bit
in GNOME 1/2.4 days, but found it to be of no improvement
to my navigation (I would “jump” from location to another
with the location bar, which now is replaced by ctrl-L).
What is most annoying about the anti-spatial argumentation
is that it always starts with either
a) “it’s too difficult to navigate to /etc…”
or
b) “I hate those million windows that open”
a) A _user_ is not supposed to navigate outside his/her
home directory. Any external resources (network shares etc)
should be (and AFAIK, are) available without navigating
trough the rootdir. Admins can use the browser when they
need to go trough the root (how often is that anyways?)
b) Window management can be a bitch, true. However, the
benefits of multiple open windows overcome the annoyance
of managing them. If they are properly sized and positioned
it’s a far easier task to move a file from a/b/c to a/d/e
by drag and drop than it is to copy, navigate up, up, down,
down and paste. And yes, the tree can be used to d&d. But
then it’s a bitch to hit the small label among 100 other
small labels compared to the open window.
Spatial nautilus needs to be taken as an additude chance
too to be useful, and not just opening in the same window
and hiding the toolbars.
I fully agree, that keeping gnome clean and skinny is necessary.
I do not realy care the buttonorder though. I also dislike
spatial nautilus. I have not faced gconf yet, but one thing Im
sure about I hate windows-registry, and human readable/editable
config files are still needed. Im happy with Firefox, and the
way it is developing, so I think the efforts to develop a native
web browser for gnome should be spent on developing other
parts of gnome instead.
What really, really, really annoys me in gtk is that in a list I cannot use the keyboard to navigate a list of items. Example: the font selector. I would assume that if I click in one of the fonts and then I press a key, it would go to the first font starting with that letter. No such luck. It annoys me to no end.
KDE does it on all menus. Small things like this is what keeps me going back to KDE apps (I run xfce as my wm so I’d like to use gtk base apps).
For those of you who don’t know, this project is created by Ali Akcaagac, aka oGALAXYo. He’s an infamous anti-GNOME agitator who’s been trolling every single GNOME-related story for years. You can read all about him on this site:
http://geocities.com/aliakcaagac/
Miguel and Havoc insist on copying Windows, and that results in a system that uses a hacked OO system on top of C, where the smallest apps depend on 30+ libraries, and that is 2 orders of magnitude slower than WindowMaker (and needs ten times the memory and disk space.)
Currently GConf stores its information in human readable xml files.
However. what GConf really does is to add a layer of abstraction between the physical storage of the config information and the applications using it.
The only similarity with windows registry is probably that it stores its information in a key-value form.
While I agree with Ali about the button order and bloat, I quite like the spacial Nautilus. Firstly, Jamie McCracken announced that he’ll be maintaining his own version of Nautilus with enhancement patches (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2004-July/thread.html) and now this desicion from Akcaagac. As a Gnome user and translator, I just wish Gnome devs wake up and listen to users. I hope these two incidents will help Gnome more.
Just on a side note,
Man, you have nothing useful to do in your life than to chase one man’s every comment and opinion and shamelessly publish that on geocities, do you? Get a life please…
Actually, Havoc insists on NOT just copying Windows. He says in a number of places that if we copy windows, we’ll always be trailing and we’ll never be better. Linux/KDE/GNOME actually have to innovate; copying Windows is pretty much a dead end and not as interesting technologically.
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/html/2004/07/#200407190952
http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/2004/7/21#00:28
“Havoc also raised the issue of diverging options for the free desktop world: either to emulate Windows, or build something alternate on its own terms. It was his view that it’s easier to win on real user value than to be forever playing catchup with “technical castles of unbounded size.” This despite the fact that many open source developers tend to think it’s easier to copy features.”
Great site, I enjoyed it quite a lot, I’m sorry to say I accidently pointed the Jeff Waugh Mega troll comment out to him on IRC causing a minor disturbance.
Either way, oGALAXYo has been spamming every forum and new site about his new egocentric, not based on usability studies project. Could we please just ignore him in the future?
Aside CVSGNOME and the closed source Atlantis browser, I haven’t seen anything he has actually done within GNOME, so I don’t see why he is this big GNOME developer he claims to be.
Geez, the person who made galaxy-watch is sick, even more so that oGalaxyO himself.
Actually, I even think he raises quite some valid points.
– Spatial Nautilus: a combination of a Finder/Tracker like file manager and applications like iPhoto or iTunes would be great, yet Nautilus isn’t like Finder/Tracker. It’s too bloated, it has too big icons, it doesn’t remember icon positions, it doesn’t have a window-auto-size feature, …
– GConf-Editor is bad. I don’t think that an approach of removing features (== moving them to GConf-Editor) is a good approach to usability. If you do think so, please end this discussion with these two commands:
cp ./helloworld /sbin/init
reboot -f
– A KHTML port is a good idea. While it appears to be possible to use GTK+ for scrollbars, this seems to be impossible for buttons, edit boxes and dropdown lists. This makes that any Gecko-based browser does not blend into Gnome nicely. As Apple has shown. KHTML can be made to use native widgets.
I agree with every single point expressed by the guy. I’m trying so hard to make gnome my default desktop, but every time I set it up I find something is wrong with the overall concept. according to my personal tastes, obviously. I stick to fluxbox and kde as my desktops.
…uhm I’m not thinking gnome directly steals ideas from apple’s osx, but it’s strange enough to see it is so heavily inspired by their point of view… and so lacking touch with the userbase.
I would try GoneMe anytime. One thing is for sure, this guy has chosen the hard path, I wouldn’t foresee many distros offering GoneME… maybe hacking dropline to install it could be a way.
once it’s ready 🙂
…if you think that is bad, he has been spreading his usual rants on some German news sites like prolinux.de, too.
Do we really need another environment? I was hopefull that freedesktop could unite the efforts but I see that this is not a concern for most anyone. I am a developer who would like to have some coherent development plataform. Some times choice is ulseless.
What annoys me the most about GNOME (and every other GUI environemnt out there) is that they allow applications to have windows, the worst problem is that they allow applications to render a file/working space.
This really is the job of the GUI to handle, applications should just handle the data IN the files.
First oGalaxyO is not a troll or flamer.
second the gconf is orrible
it’s fine the schema approach but the implementation is bloated.
third the spatial nautilus is not a feature but a specific
intention of developers who didn’t considerate the users.
the last thing
i do not agree with ogalaxyo for python libglade and mono.
end
PS Filippo Pappalardo che se il figlio di pappalardo il cantante
?
Hope he focuses on speed improvements in GNOME. GNOME 2.6 slithers on my Athlon 700. GNOME 1.4, XFCE4, and KDE 3.2 are pretty fast.
I think Gecko is more advanced than KHTML at the moment, *but*, KHTML seems to have much more momentum. I was astonished by the changes and speed differences between KHTML in KDE 3.1 and 3.2, and I am pleasently suprised by all the changes in KDE 3.3 beta1.
Apple seems to have done a lot of good with KHTML development with Safari. I think that this rate, KHTML will catch up with Gecko by KDE 4.0, and will have a much smaller and tighter codebase to extend things for the future– things like XHTML 2.0, all of CSS 3.0, xforms, etc..
This is the best news all year! I’ve been waiting for this since 2.x. Excellent work!
Good luck to him. I switched from Gnome 2.4 to KDE 3.2 cause I didn’t like the direction Gnome was heading. I agree on every point he states (though not on Python).
However the key point here is *speed*. When I switched, it seemed to me like a new world. KDE was *much* faster than Gnome, and all the bloated and strange things in KDE 3.1 were gone. It’ll be hard now to make me switch again, but I really do hope you Ali can bring Gnome on the right road again.
“KHTML will catch up with Gecko by KDE 4.0, and will have a much smaller and tighter codebase to extend things for the future– things like XHTML 2.0, all of CSS 3.0, xforms, etc..”
Perhapas by 4.0. But right now, Gecko is WAY ahead. KHTML’s “compliance” is on the line with IE right now- that is, it gets messed up with lots of advanced CSS stuff. Gecko, on the other hand, handles CSS 1-2.1 flawlessly and even handles large parts of the CSS3 spec (can you say “opacity property”). I still maintain that KHTML is a slower rendering engine too.
Oh, and for the rest of you, a question. I prefer spatial nautilus. So should I fork gnome now so that I can have a non-non-spatial fork?
“I’m putting opinions as facts? No, the majority of people made sure that spatial design went away. And that’s a fact.”
If its a fact you are able to refer us to that fact, right? I see it stated many times here, but i don’t see any references. Frankly, i think it is very hard to proof the majority of GNOME users prefers non-spatial, so i’m really looking for some GOOD references.
“Sorry, but if XFce4 would have a better file manager (XFFM), I would probably already prefer it to GNOME/Nautilus.”
The file manager is configurable. I had success with XFE among new users. XFE is basically very Explorer-alike. Maybe you like it? IIRC the website is http://xfe.sf.net or search at Freshmeat.
I’d rather see this “news” from this person not posted here because
1) He’s been trolling for years on GNOME. Because of this, it is not likely this is something productive as well.
2) It is spam. The person is spamming it on other websites, like Slashdot.
3) It does not create a healthy discussion at all, rather a flamewar.
4) We’ll see when there’s something productive after a while instead. Anybody can claim they have “forked GNOME” because anyone can.
hmm i dont know. you said that almost every guy around you is unhappy with the new gnome direction. well, here i am: i love the new gnome release.
– i love spatial nautilus, it allows me to work in an awesome speed.
– i like the new direction, because it want’s to keep it all simple.
i don’t can agree you in speed issues. i loved the old releases too, but they were kind of slow, mamma. now it is all better for me.
but i think it is good, that people are doing their own way.
go on!
I avoid these two like the plague, bloated, slow, complex, mind-numbing options and icons, XP wannabes, totally defeating the UNIX concept.
Everything is based on looks, eyecandy, and titillating objects on the desktop. Tmagine a good looking car with a slow engine that gives you bad mileage, one that breaks down constantly at a drop of a hat. Just walk into any forum and witness the problems of these two in any Linux distro, the fixes are also bloated, and complex, and don’t warrant any assurance. Yes, we like to talk about Windows, but more and more, we are becoming just like it.
Instead on pulling resources to increase the speed of the OS, and easyness of package installation, we waste the resources on looks and frivolous tricks.
I agree 100% with the author of this article, at last, somebody took the bull by the horns and faced reality.
Viva IceWM, Fluxbox, and Wmaker!
i don’t know about other distro’s builds of Gnome but 2.6 in Slackware-10 is quite nice :^)
Galaxy seems to have a very similar attitude like the cdrecord/cdrtools guy, Jörg Schilling. I feel that they are very fast in making wrong assumptions and use very hard words to express their opinion.
He’s right about esd though. On Gentoo i always unmerge it by hand, and after every update it’s in again. Hey, we have GStreamer and Linux users have ALSA too (i know they’re not the same, but both can do what esd did).
Basicly what GNOME was trying to achieve here is cloning MacOSX 1:1
Seems he hasn’t spent even 1 minute working with Mac OS X.
And he has some spelling problems.
I rather think he tries to make GoneME a GTK-based KDE. And that would make no sense. If i wanted KDE, i would install it (i even think i’m going to do this because people say speed has improved – but it’s so bloated).
Many users suffer from the speed problems though. But he’s very inspecific what he’s going to do about that, and the lag mostly comes from GTK (and the GTK folks are already doing something about it).
And spatial nautilus makes browsing so much faster – and you’ve got so much more real screen estate.
Hmm, I thought the separation of the core engine was nearer. In that case, using KHTML might make some sense. Still, I prefer Gecko’s engine.
I use a “lite” version of Gnome2 that doesn’t come with Epiphany nor Mozilla… I use Firefox. But no, you can’t still use Epiphany without Mozilla and that’s a shame.
Ok, here are a couple of my problems with this. Yes, many people don’t like spatial nautilus, you can change that easily, that doesn’t mean it should be thrown out. Other OS’s offer that choice, and I like the choice being there. Isn’t linux about choice, and not having it dictated to you?
The comment this guy makes about having all your pics, music, vids, what not in a folders not more than 3 clicks into your filesystem, is not what people want? This guy spends too much time in the closet, (not sexuality), and doesn’t operate with real “users” enough. I do Windows support, and the “My Documents” folder is the MOST used folder in Windows period. Why? Because it is simple, easy and fast, and most users truely do not know the filesystem NOR do they WANT TO!!!! Do you have any idea how many people I have had to explain what the C: drive is too? I am talking about people that have been using computers for years, not newbies. People want simplicity, that is why Mac’s are so popular, and why Windows post 95 is so popular. It makes it easy. That has been *nixes problem, the difficulty in use.
This guy is not going to solve that problem, his goals are to turn gnome into what he wants it to be. Not make it the most usable gui for linux that will make it steal Mac and Windows slush heads. (Though I doubt he wants them using Linux)
Firstly, Jamie McCracken announced that he’ll be maintaining his own version of Nautilus with enhancement patches
Thanks very much for the link. I don’t bother about most of his changes but the ability to set the left mouse click to “open window and close parent behind” will probably rock.
> Perhapas by 4.0. But right now, Gecko is WAY ahead. KHTML’s “compliance” is on the line with IE right now- that is, it gets messed up with lots of advanced CSS stuff. Gecko, on the other hand, handles CSS 1-2.1 flawlessly
Erm, no. KHTML handles a lot of standards compliant stuff nearly as well as Gecko. There are many parts of CSS2 that KHTML and Gecko interpret differently, however. Yeah, that’s why CSS 2.1 has until very recently been still a work in progress. Gecko handles a lot of real life broken webpages better than KHTML. *That* is the area that KHTML has been improving on a lot as of late.
> even handles large parts of the CSS3 spec (can you say “opacity property”).
KHTML supports opacity as well, and has for years. Indeed, it was the first of the four major rendering engines to implement it, and it was based on -khtml-opacity that Mozilla and Opera implemented their own custom CSS properities. It was only after this that it eventually became part of CSS3. Safari currently implements as much CSS3 as Gecko does; however, they implement different parts of the specs.
> I still maintain that KHTML is a slower rendering engine too.
Debatable in terms of load speed of pages. In my experience, it requires significantly less memory than Gecko does however.
BTW, CSS3 support in Safari versus Mozilla:
http://geocities.com/seanmhall2003/css3/compat.html
twm works for me!!!! Fast, effecient.
🙂
Yep, too bad twm doesn’t support virtual desktops.
twm is so bloated! Gimme Windows 1.0, that was a really slick and productive working environment.
I think the KDE folks are behind this in one big konspiracy — divide and konquer
Currently Spatial is fairly integrated with the browser, and that works rather well. At any time you can right click a folder and select “Browse Folder” to get to a browser view. The drawback I see to this is that the browser is slow to load, and the browser isn’t integrated with spatial. There is no comparable “Open in Spatial” option in the browser that would allow you to go back.
If we were to replace the full browser with a simple tree app in the integration in spatial, replace “Browse Folder” with “View Tree”, and have the tree as a simple quick way to open spatial nautilus windows, you would have a much faster, and much more integrated solution.
oGalaxyo, Don’t let the nay sayers bring you down. Good luck.
I don’t really have much respect for Ali because of his stubbornness and all the FUD he is spreading but I think he has some points. I find funny that he believe that GNOME copied OS X for button orders but “forgot” that all other WM/DEs are copying from Windows but I think the cleanups and the de-bloatness would be welcome. Like I said previously, I am using a custom “lite” version of GNOME because I hate the bloatness… and I don’t use KDE for that reason (example: I don’t want to get kdemultimedia and ALL the apps coming with it when I only want juk… I wouldn’t mind if kdemultimedia were only libraries, though). Anyway, I wish him luck, hoping that he didn’t only spewed hot air.
They don’t want to adopt it because it is in KDE, and they are naturally partisan; they won’t listen to reason, about it being a smaller, faster, better engine that integrates much better with the rest of the desktop and has a better licence than the mozilla licence.
However, Gnome has a track record of copying OS X at every opportunity, so perhaps the way forward is to encourage the Gnome folks to copy Apple, and not mention KDE at all? I’m pretty sure they would fall all over themselves to adopt KHTML if it were just Apple using it, in their minds.
To all the WindowMaker/Fluxbox fans who keep saying GNOME/KDE are bloated: get over it. GNOME and KDE are application frameworks as much as they are user environments. Yes, that means they must have lot’s of functionality for applications to use. But on the flip-side, it means that GNOME/KDE applications are much smaller, because they all use shared functionality.
What apps do you WindowMaker/Fluxbox folks use anyway? Unless they are KDE or GNOME apps, there is a very high probability that there is tons of redundant code in your system, because each app has to reinvent a lot of common functionality, instead of sharing it. Now, if you like WMaker/Fluxbox for the UI, then fine. But the “KDE and GNOME are bloated” claim is not something that makes a great deal of sense.
*clicks and beeps in the background*
*A scren lights up and a crackle of static is heard*
“Houston? Do you copy?”
“Affirmative”
“Houston, we have a flamewar!”
*scene fades to black*
I do not think anyone in Gnome objects over someone porting
KHTML over to Gtk. Ali or anyone else is free to port it,
and if folks adopt that technology then great.
I do not think you will see anyone in Gnome asking for more
bloat, I think the opposite is the case. It is simpler to
complain than to do something about it. Profiling and tuning are arts that not everyone is willing to do.
Today more folks are using Mozilla though; The engine is
there, and with things like the tiny profile of Mozilla, the
memory and footprint issues are solved.
Researching new directions in gnome is something that we have always encouraged. Everyone does it everyday: people actively work with branches and people actively try new ideas. For every application that we ship today five died out of lack of maintenance, vision, features, etc. It is an iterative process.
“What apps do you WindowMaker/Fluxbox folks use anyway?”
Pekwm, firefox, thunderbird, gkrellm, vim/gvim, streamtuner and Beep most frequently used apps. None of these are KDE/GNOME apps, so you mean this means a lot of redundancy? Where?
i keep most all of them installed because i want to be able to show Windows users that Linux gives a choice of desktops, and i give a brief description of each one as i log on to them, explaining Gnome & KDE are more full featured and user friendly and i keep Blackbox,xfce,windowmaker explaining that these are lighter and require more user input but when running intensive applications a lighter desktop helps to give more resources to CPU intensive applications…
depending on what i am doing will determine what sort of desktop i want to use, like when i am just taking it easy i will go with either Gnome or KDE and play solitare or mahjongg, while listening to music with XMMS, but when it is time for work i easily logoff and back on to one of the light WMs & open OpenOffce to a custom template i built.
people should not be so narrow-minded about what desktop to use, “heck” install several and use them all (only one at a time)
:^)
$00.02
Hi,
I recall this topic being brought up on the desktop-devel list for GNOME a year or so ago. Some developers were considering or were in the early process of porting KHTML to use GTK+ widgets for GNOME. The GNOME developers were not hostile toward KHTML; rather, they had already put a lot of effort in their integration with Gecko and Mozilla, including making Gecko accessible through ATK and at-spi. So, the GNOME developers were more inclined to stick with Mozilla because a lot of the integraton work had already been done there.
I’m sure you could find the thread via google. Good luck!
Right you are… here’s the link: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-March/msg004… It doesn’t start talking about KHTML right away, but it’s in there. Pretty good read, of what I’ve read so far.
too bad twm doesn’t support virtual desktops.
Good thing there is Vtwm http://www.visi.com/~hawkeyd/vtwm.html !
Actually, Dave Camp (a pretty active nautilus developer) has considered/is considering adding a tree view to spatial.
Sounds good!
I hope he finds a good way to implement it that keeps the interface clear and usable.
Apparently he doesn’t think it breaks spatial. Maybe we’ll see it in a future release.
I was going to say that before too. What does it really matter if Nautilus is 100% or 50% spatial or navigational, or what ever, as long as it serves you well, it is easy, fast and powerful to use?
Trying to achieve pure “spatialism” or “navigationalism” sounds like useless dogmatism from the usability POV.
Trying to achieve pure “spatialism” or “navigationalism” sounds like useless dogmatism from the usability POV.
No it doesn’t, because if you don’t strictly follow one metaphor, the interface gets unpredictable if you don’t know it by heart.