“The GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 5 release, “Reciprocity”, is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is now available for immediate download. The GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME’s highly regarded user interface.” Read more at LinuxToday.
GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 5 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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Could somebody like point it out to me.
I think Gnome is trying to impress upon us its seriousness by using a 100% plain grey interface, while XP and OSX play with their childish blue and silver interfaces…
that or someone actually thinks Windows 95/MacOS 7 is stylish and worth copying…..
I too still don’t understand what about it is *highly* regarded. Guess it must be all that Microsoft like interface they’ve strapped on to X. Tho I must be nice and say that they have really cleaned up the user interface. *cough* Linux *cough* sucks *cough*
Wow, AngryBrit, don’t get too subtle on us, what are you *really* trying to say?
Unlike Windows, GNU/Linux as an OS is not permanently tied to a single UI. Don’t like the colour scheme for your wm/desktop environment of choice? Find a new theme… or design one yourself. This is a concept that Gnome/KDE and just about every other *nix WM under the sun has been using for years… and microsoft never bothered to copy until XP.
Don’t like the window manager itself? Find another one. Or design one of your own. Contribute code to an existing one.
What I’m getting at here man, is that you can’t judge the OS by a UI you don’t like.
Windows isn’t permanently tied to a single UI either. I run Windows98 with the LiteStep shell. I have tried a few others, like DarkStep and GeOShell. All these have many schemes/themes to try. Linux doesn’t own the market on UI customization.
But litestep is only a shell. It’s not quite as much of a customization as you’ll get with an X window manager (although I personally dislike X.) Linux may not rule the GUI, but it does rule costomization in general, as most UNIX-ish OSes do.
“But litestep is only a shell. It’s not quite as much of a customization as you’ll get with an X window manager…”
If you replace the Windows system shell (Explorer) with LiteStep or Object Desktop or the like, the developer has total control over how your alternative shell will look and feel in contrast because it has been written separately and completely from scratch. Explorer is completely GONE in these cases, so I don’t see how replacing your window manager in Unix could be any different, conceptually. In fact, because you are still using X underneath it all, I would say that the opposite is probably true – Unix window managers [must] share more features in common with each other than Windows shell replacements have to.
Actually, the default look of the gtk toolkit looks more like motif (an old Xlib toolkit) than it looks like windows. I for one don’t really like motif and, thus, the default look of gtk. However, it’s really not too hard to find a theme and various gtk theme engine extensions to make it look the way you want (xenophillia and flat are commonly used ones). I’m more interested in UI usability than eye candy. Eye candy typically just gets in the way. I find that gtk is very usuable and clean. This is why it’s highly regarded. It is not because it is supposed to win eye candy contests.
gnome also has cool aqua styles, just because it defaults to grey, doesn’t mean you have to keep it like that. You haven’t obviously used gnome, or you would see you can change simple things like color.
Moi ? Too subtle? Never
Ha ha ha!!!
I just wish those Linux people would actually innovate/ instead of copying every detail from XP or OS X. Geez, is it just ME or they are running out of ideas? With Eazel, it started off great but then it kinda dwindled. Linux is too late.
X11 is simply a graphics server. It has nothing to do with the behavior of anything. The clients completely define how things display and behave. X does not impose any limitations. You can program it to do anything you can imagine.
Oi. If there was doubt before, now we *know* you work in Redmond. You said the magic word…
Theres a flame war brewing in your last paragraph, but I will say this: many of Microsoft’s so-called “innovated” features in XP have existed in one form or another in the *nix world for quite some time. Even the fancy dock in OSX is an improvement over the NeXtStep dock which has been around for some time.
Instead of fanning flames… list off some of the features you think “Linux” has stolen, so we can debate the merits.
… also.. “those Linux people”???
—
feeding the tamagotchi one more time….
If you replace the Windows system shell (Explorer) with LiteStep or Object Desktop or the like, the developer has total control over how your alternative shell will look and feel in contrast because it has been written separately and completely from scratch.
Not true, you still have to deal with the Windows window manager. A window manager in X has to deal with the gui and the window management (depending on what one, more the later than the prior – leading to full GUIs like GNOME and KDE which in term sit on top of window managers). A windows alternate shell does give you a lot of control, but you’re still playing by the standard rules as far as how the OS actually handles the windows.
The easiest way to tell the difference level of control comparing a Windows Shell and an X Window Manager; load up Windows without any shell (If you need an easy way to do this, make notepad your shell – it’ll just load it at start up;) and do the same with X. You’ll notice windows has a titlebar, and a border. You can fully interact with it still, moving it around, resizing, etc. That’s because the Windows Window manager has loaded already. An X window manager controls the GUI in many cases – AND that stuff. The X app will be whereever it got placed, and will be stuck like that. You’ll be able to use it and interact with it but good luck moving and resizing it among any other shell like think you could do.
Gnome is crap anyway!
> Oi. If there was doubt before, now we *know* you work in
> Redmond. You said the magic word…
No I am the Micro$oft basher in these here park. 1st of all I’m not british. And 2nd it’s the *old* magic word. It’s Security now.
> Theres a flame war brewing in your last paragraph, but I
> will say this: many of Microsoft’s so-called “innovated”
> features in XP have existed in one form or another in
> the *nix world for quite some time. Even the fancy dock
> in OSX is an improvement over the NeXtStep dock which
> has been around for some time.
Agreed 100%.
> Instead of fanning flames… list off some of the
> features you think “Linux” has stolen, so we can debate
> the merits.
I prefer the term ‘flamethrowing’ if you don’t mind. OK, let’s start with the integrated Web Browser (Nautilus , Konqueror) then it’s the Start Menu (Foot Menu(?), KDE Menu), etc…
> … also.. “those Linux people”???
I MEant the people who make up the default interface on distributions. You know all those Windows XP cheap look-a-like that are appearing. AKA Lindows. My God it’s so lame.
Well, I’m usually in the pro Microsoft camp (well, not really, but much more so than pro Linux anyway), but I have to agree that Linux and X are much more customizable than is Windows. However, I would also say that sometimes (not always) trying to cope with text configuration files in the *Nix enviroment is really not worth the trouble, unless you have a lot of spare time.
But, this is slowly beginning to change, as the developers attempt to make Linux look and act more like Windows. Windows pundets look at this and accuse the Linux camp of trying to copy everything MS does (as if MS actually innovated much of anything to begin with), but what they (the developers) are really trying to do is to make Linux as much like Windows as possible to appease the Windows users like me who refuse to learn the ‘Linux way’ of doing things.
Believe me when I say that Linux has enough functionality built in that it does NEED to look or act like Windows to make it functional (in fact, adding all of this bloat probably makes it LESS functional than it already is), but it’s the only way you’re going to get the masses to cross over, who have been in the Windows world for years and absolutely either cannot or will not deal with anything that does look and feel like what they are used to.
…to pay all those simply users that write nonsense stuff at forums, chats, etc.
I mean, why should anybody work for a huuuughe company that has a loooot of money and defend it for FREE?
I think Linux and the open source philosophy is great because I think knowledge and mostly tecnical and tecnological knowledge should be free as part of the human culture. Linux looks great? ok! use it. Linux looks nasty? you have the code, you can improve it. And the most important thing is that Linux means people, real people working on it. Can anybody name a microsoft programmer?
well, it’s time to shut up. If people see Linux as something to talk bad about it must be for some reason. see yaa
Xfree and Windows both suck. There i said it. I’m so tired of these holy war debates. I haven’t read a single post by anyone who knows the real story about either side or the argument, and i doubt i ever will. Probably because those who know have better things to do than argue. Aren’t there newsgroups for this?
At any rate, does anyone have any comments that REALLY relate to Gnome?? Push the “so and so stole thsi” crap aside. Personally, I think its come a long way, and I would also say that I think its UI fits my tastes much better than its counterpart.
nivenh
…that the Linux-folks try to make Linux look alike some other OS’s. But maybe it would be better to put the resources in so that it acts like some other OS’s in some ways and not just look like them.
With that I mean, that no group is trying to make it as easy as on OSX to install progs in Linux. This would really help to increase the userbase.
Or just to fix for example so that I can copy-paste url’s from a Browser to all the other Browsers !!
Oh yeah it’s great to have thousands of window-managers which I can customize to look like the other window-managers 😉
Yes, I could start to write it my own. Wasn’t it that you just want to write ?
But I’m not a programmer, and I believe that I’m not alone with this meaning.
Thoems
… form dr_sneed. Get over it. They both suck. Lets wipe out your MSDOS CD and install a “real” OS and be happy with it. (On the side note, as much it is sad for me to say as a Linux user, Linux is mostly implementing ideas of others, even FreeBSD have more innovation than Linux related projects).
Relating to GNOME, hope they don’t release 2.0 any time soon. Hope around their bug report database, and they are full of bug reports. Using (just installed, and currently using) Beta 5, it is still buggy. Well, I’m sticking to kDE 3.0 for real work in the mean time (which is IRC?)…
I’ve written this twice now and my dang computer has frozen. I hate my computer, and I’ll make this brief.
the Start Menu (Foot Menu(?), KDE Menu),
That was for Windows ’95, and didn’t exist in Windows 3.11. In Windows 3.11 there was a popular product named Dashboard, although that wasn’t even a fresh idea at the time. Do a search for Dashboard and Windows. Dashboard had the same features as the start menu, plus it had system monitors, and some other guff.
the integrated Web Browser (Nautilus , Konqueror)
Well, I don’t give “integration” itself much weight as the only people that could provide integration in Windows were Microsoft (who did in Windows ’98/IE4, I think). I take it you mean integration as in base libraries, and using the IE engine for other parts of the GUI? No one else can win that.
Prior to ’98 there weren’t many embeddedable HTML rendering widgets but there were a few (licences could be obtained from Netscape, and Opera). This was available since Netscape 1..
Before the Internet got big (say, before 1994) there was of course the need for embedded text/graphics rendering and the most popular was Rich Text renderers (after the Internet bang these RTF renderers embraced HTML, and had hypertext, etc.). These Rich Text widgets were far ahead of HTML renderers for a few years until about ’94.
I say this because this is the way that Microsoft took their operating system. They own RTF. Their ‘integrated’ page rendering widgets were Rich Text widgets, and until they superceded these with IE they expanded RTF to deal with links. Deal with HTML is no big deal, and there were HTML wrappers for RTF that could do all but the most stupid pages.
Regardless, even here Microsoft weren’t first. OS/2 had Rich Text (and other formats, as wrappers to an internal renderer) as part of a base library since early releases in the late 80’s.
——
ps. Gnome rox0rs. With vector text and now SVG icons weren’t finally removing resolution dependance.
pps. Gosh. That wasn’t short at all. I’m glad my computer didn’t crash. I love my computer.
So dreadfully tired of all these “linux sux”/”windows sux”/”Gnome sux”/”KDE sux”/etc. comments that are only backed up by the reasoning that “I say it sucks, therefore it must be so.”
I’m happily running Blackbox as my main GUI… if I need a shell, xterm it is (no gross mutant pseudo-DOS command prompt like in my XP Pro partition). On top of Blackbox, I have KDE 3 installed. KDE3 is fine for me when I need. That doesn’t mean ‘gnome sucks’, it means gnome isn’t for me…
Speaking of Gnome (isn’t that what this forum is about?), I think it’s going to be a vast improvement internally and externally over previous versions. Hell, I might even be ‘converting’ over once all the kinks are worked out.
“A screenshot from jrb. It highlights the new panel with its antialiased icons. It also shows some of the newer GNOME applications, like memprof and gfloppy.”
As well as this example of program naming, there is a lovely page of screen-shots on the Gnome.org site to tell users what it is all about and what it is like. After a three minute visit, I could easilly envision the remarks normal humans (not computer geeks) would make after spending that same three-minute look:
“Why is it so cluttered??”
“What is all of that for??”
“I don’t want to have to learn all of that!”
“I just want something simple and easy to use!!”
This is clearly still not software for normal people. Or, they’re not at all interested in targeting normal people. OR they don’t know how to (which would not surprise me).
Tweakers should check it out and have fun with it, but normal people will stick with what MS and Apple have been force-feeding them for the last decade. If Gnome “thinks” it is targeting normal human beings (not geeks and/or tweakers) then it is doomed to remain a geek/tweaker product. At least until the developers (or the leadership) learn what normal people are like; they’re not like the geeks, tweakers, techs, system builders, programmers, etc that make Gnome.
What’s that you say? They ARE targeting normal human beings? Oh, you mean because of the “accessibility” features and “user friendly designs?” HAH!
Gnome is still the only Unix/X11 UI project I know of that is at least somehow aiming for usability. KDE is running into a featuritis, where others like Enlightenment are just trying to be 1337 (no offense).
Not ready but cool
I don’t care about the so called mainstream or fashon I just look at what suits my needs.
I use about every WM/DE/SE w/out problems and I use the apps I like in the same way.
a2z is crap anyway!
linux rulez