“One of the things that the GNOME design crew have been focusing on recently is creating a new approach to application design for GNOME 3. We want GNOME applications to be thoroughly modern, and we want them to be attractive and a delight to use. That means that we have to do application design differently to how we’ve done it in the past.”
“thoroughly modern”
There are few words that sound more evasive and dubious than “modern”
Is it a way to tell that they will follow the current trends set by others ?
Modern like in Chaplin’s “modern times”? The global society that started more than 100 years ago ?
So I’m here thinking – maybe they mean outright modernism?
But… what would that mean for GUI? With that question in mind, I decide to check what tends to be a fairly decent and approachable reflection of accepted, status quo sentiments about many topics: I go to “Modernism” Wiki article.
And right there, at the top (supposedly most representative) I see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Hofmann%27s_painting_~*~… …wait a minute, that’s MS Metro!
You’re absolutely right. I want a post-modern desktop.
It seems all this designed for smaller screens.
I can see how a few releases down the ne gnome look could become perfect for tablets and the like, but what about the desktop and larger screens?
if I have a 20 or 22 inch monitor I dont want an empty application window hogging the whole screen.
Even worse without a visual way to switch between applications.it just gets more confusing.
Full screen works best IMO with easy window/application switching.
I tried Gnome 3.0 and 3.2 on my netbook and it wastes screen realestate left and right.
LXDE with very little tuning does a ten times better job.
So it sucks for big screens and small screens.
Don’t confuse this with current Gnome – the current 3.x series works just fine on a big screen, but this idea of maximising windows by default is just absurd for such systems.
I’ve not tried G3 on a netbook – where does the wastage come from? The actual shell takes up very little space (just the top panel) – I’m guessing the problem is the excessive amount of padding in the default widget theme?
Can’t agree more. Screenwasting seem to be the new thing. I can see the need for large margins and paddings when we have finger input but for mouse?
Here I am with two 24″ screens, I can have many many windows open at the same time, and when I read the new Gnome 3 guidelines they talk about preferring maximized windows… Guess I’m old school when I prefer tiling WMs.
They should implement dynamic tiling like awesome.
The shell should allow users to add/remove/swap applications on the current activity and add/remove/swap activities on the current workspace. There should be an option to swap workspaces on the current viewport, but it might be disabled by default.
The Wayland render target for GTK+ is coming along, and GNOME 3 will probably ship a default Wayland compositor in the near future. This will make it clean and efficient to implement dynamic mapping of client buffers onto the viewport.
When a unique set of applications is first cued to the workspace, the window manager may use account history and/or application heuristics to rank all the possible tile layouts for this number of client windows and to display the initial layout.
The user may trigger an input event to iterate through the ranked layouts, drag windows to swap their layout positions, and drag borders to resize the tiles.
The window manager should support dialog windows with at least one floating layer. It may or may not let users toggle individual windows between the tiling and floating layers.
The shell should be overlaid on top of the application windows, expanding from a screen edge toward fullscreen with scrolling as necessary to fit icons and widgets.
Yes, these principles are more suitable for tablets, than for 24″ or bigger screens.
http://www.osnews.com/img/25605/music-album-playback.png
LOL. That’s a whole lotta nothingness. That is exactly how you DON’T design a graphical user interface.
Congrats, GNOME devs! First you’ve succeeded in dumbing down your desktop environment and its applications by removing features completely from the interface (even from the configuration windows) and forcing users to modify GConf. Then you succeeded in changing the whole damn environment for no reason at all other than just for the hell of it and making it work better on smaller touchscreen devices, while shooting yourself in the foot worse than the KDE guys did with KDE4. And now, it looks like you’re well on your path to success in wasting assloads of screen space. Great job!
Yeah, you’ve just hit on one of my massive pet peeves. People need to make a distinction between removing features (which in the case of Gnome 3.0 were never there to begin with) and not implementing them yet. At the moment we’re at 3.2, Gnome 2 at the same stage of development was considerably more spartan and headache inducing.
Are they going to get around to putting everything that was in Gnome 2 by the end of it’s life cycle? Probably not. The design most certainly will evolve and grow though.
With the GNOME project’s track record, I think it can automatically be assumed that “simplicity” is far more important than functionality to them. So I don’t have very high expectations for a lot of stuff that was in GNOME 2 being back to GNOME 3. I do expect lots of changes and tweaking, maybe a new feature here and there (like you said it is relatively new), but not a whole lot.
Although I was massively disappointed by KDE4 for several releases, they’ve really picked up the pace and have turned it into something decent. But then again, KDE always was all about choices with configuration options out the ass; not so with GNOME. Who knows, GNOME 3 might eventually turn out to be something decent, but I won’t be holding my breath on them introducing lots of functionality.
They seem set on designing something that’s more at home on a small touchscreen for idiots to use instead of a traditional general-purpose desktop setup that power users would feel comfortable with. Just like Ubuntu’s Unity and the next Windows GUI. The GNOME people always reminded me of Apple; only these days, they seem to be outdoing Apple at their own game (dumbing down), and I can’t say that I’m thrilled about it or expecting much.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been in limbo installing Ubuntu 11.04 for friends and family for a while now because I don’t want to move away from Gnome 2. I was hoping Cinnamon would fix things but having read this I think the waiting is over, It looks like the apps are going to be as “simplified” as the desktop. XFCE here I come.
Exactly.
I have always sensed that the GNOME people are trying to “out-tard” Apple.
And after years and years when it grows and matures and people like Gnome again, they are going to throw it all and start with a new fancy design from scratch again, and people will be pissed off again.
History seems to repeat itself all the time.
Edited 2012-02-13 05:46 UTC
You will notice that even among current Gnome supporters, there’s a lot of “WTF are you doing?” on that thread…
I completely agree with you. However I don’t understand why you love the metro interface, which wastes an attrocious amount of space in the name of style, on a device where space is at much more of a premium.
http://i.imgur.com/5Ajzx.png
Mobile vs. desktop. Metro on Windows 8 is just as idiotic.
This sounds like you are being an apologist.
So it is OK to waste space on a smaller screen because it’s for a mobile application. Absurd. Space is at a premium on a small screen. You should make screen elements larger rather than use a lot of space up with superfluous text.
Compare the iPhone’s music app and WIndows Phone’s. On the iPhone, all of the screen estate is used for user interface elements.
The screen elements on my desktop computer don’t need to be larger. I bought a high resolution display so I could fit more on my screen, not watch it all disappear because someone thinks we need the same big buttons designed for fat fingers staring me in the face while I’m sitting at my desk working. My mouse zero’s in on small elements just fine, not so much for my finger tips that need a larger target.
So you want this instead?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4P0mnCI9c8M/Sw3W9q9n45I/AAAAAAAAB84/n5xXc…
It’s not about the amount of empty space in the UI, nor is it about the amount of controls in the UI. It’s about having the functionality one needs at hand in an interface that is intuitive and fast to use.
I am a Qt programmer and yet I have ditched KDE in favour of Gnome 3. I’ve been there eversince the first release and all the time it just gets better and better. Still I have hated Rhythmbox for years for being so bloated in the UI. The new mockup of Gnome music player is much better albeit only showing a single very restricted view instead of the “collection view”.
Edited 2012-02-13 20:11 UTC
I’m not an airplane pilot so I don’t need that many controls and displays.
But I want my system to provide me all the vital information and knobs as readily as the airplane “UI” does. Not (much) more and (definitely) not less. Btw, “readily” means here “visible on the screen at all times and accessible with minimum effort”.
Perhaps the confusion of Gnome3 designers arrived from a deep misunderstanding of what these “vital” tasks are. They are assuming we are all reading facebook or are dancing to the music. That’s perhaps true for iP*d users but it simply isn’t the case for PC users (surprise: we sometimes use PCs for work).
BTW that’s NOT what airplane UIs tend to be nowadays (not the first part of it, “visible […] at all times” – it works against presenting what is actually vital in given situation), with glass cockpits and multifunction displays.
And it’s an improvement.
Edited 2012-02-20 00:03 UTC
Dude, style IS a premium.
Well, they are just future proving their application. All that empty space is for later functionality :p
WTF?
They wanted to demonstrate the “particular album view” of their music player with that screenshot (“The (…) GNOME 3 Music app (…) contains a view for browsing and a view for looking at a particular album, artist or playlist.”). Of course that wastes a lot of space when maximised – there just is nothing else to display. It’s unfortunate that they didn’t show a picture of the other views as well, though.
That certainly is an example of excessive ‘white space’ but as a designer I understand the virtue of white space for both aesthetics and readability. Blank space allows for visual organization and the human mind processes that information more effectively. Probably rule 1 of graphic design.
Seriously, if window ‘content’ went from window edge to window edge you couldn’t read a damn thing.
1. I like the idea of the window chrome hiding when maximized quite a lot. It’s both pleasing visually and maximizes space for apps that actually warrant being full screen.
2. Maximizing apps that *don’t* warrant it by default is pants on head retarded. Yes yes we get that it’s “trendy” to spout things like “users should focus on one app at a time”, but those of us that live in the real world merely find it annoying.
Agree, that was something Ubuntu’s old Netbook remix was very good at (haven’t tried current Unity on a small screen).
According to the clarification on the linked article, that’s actually the plan – “maximise by default” would be behaviour requested by certain applications, not for every application. Which is better, though they could have saved themselves a ton of hostile reaction if they’d made that clearer in the original post.
I’m running 11.10 on my netbook, and Unity works fine once I reduce the launcher bar icon size to 16 pixels and lock it in place on the left. I despise oversize UI elements that hide, and it’s a pain to bounce the cursor off the left side just to switch apps IMHO.
My wife uses it on her Duo (touchscreen) tablet, and it’s much better than Win 7 (with tiny closely spaced UI elements that make you long for a stylus) but not as usable as Android, yet.
I see where Canonical is heading – WIMP, touch and voice control in a single UI – and they may get there. Kinda miss the Applications / Places / System tri-menus on my desktop, though.
Funny, that’s the exact opposite to me. The first Unity version had that left-hand panel eating a substantial amount of my precious screen space – forcing pretty much all web pages into horizontal scrolling – and with no way to hide the panel.
The next release (the one I’m currently running, I think) thankfully made that panel hide itself when a window was maximised. Even the 16 pixels you speak of would be far too much for me…
I was just explaining to my brother why it isn’t strange that it is impossible to record video in ubuntu/gnome with decent audio sync (tried on two different machines with different audio/video hardware).
I told him with sad irony the stories of gstreamer and pulseaudio, how both promised exciting new functionality to justify total disruption of the desktop and how in the end both provided almost nothing over existing simpler backends except for poor performance and bugs.
And how that was similar to other idiotic tangents like a completely new desktop experience with Unity/Gnome3 that again totally disrupted the lives us linux lovers, do nothing fundamentally interesting that the old desktkops didn’t and introduced a mountain of new bugs and irritations.
So now when I see this article I have to laugh. Good idea guys. And while your house burns why don’t you polish the door knobs one more time.
Sorry but I’m feeling a bit cynical about gnome right now. And before anyone suggests I “go back to windows” or something, honestly I’ve considered it but it just sucks way more in other ways. Mac? Maybe.
I feel your pain… Linux is a playground for mad software developers, Mac is (literally) evil, and Windows is a PITA to work with (and bloated, and malware infested, and…)
The BSDs strike me as providing a possible way out, but in terms of desktop functionality they’re lagging. Then again, slow and steady just might win the race, if Linux (well, the Linux userland) succeeds in immolating itself.
I also have hopes for Haiku, but so far the lack of available software just kills it. No recent Firefox or working version of Abiword makes it worthless on the desktop right now.
But alas, things are looking rather grim… Between Windows 8 and Linux, 2013-2014 might be remembered as “the year that Apple conquered the world.”
Linux isn’t the problem, there’s no need to throw it out because the GUIs on top of it suck. The BSDs are now too far behind Linux to be of much relevance. My heart is with Haiku, but my head is with Linux… for now.
I don’t feel his pain.
I have never had the problem he describes, nor have I heard of it. I am also aware that there are numerous other Linux distros and desktops to try, even some which specialize in audio/video.
Yeah, Firefox, Open/Libre Office, Audacity, Ardour, Handbrake, etc. — all of those open source software developers are crazy and useless.
… and that platform has more than its share problems, too.
Never had any trouble working with Windows, other than the typical speed bumps that come with non-familiarity. I never used Windows long enough to encounter malware/viruses, etc.
All your examples are multiplatform; all except one have little to do with Linux platform development.
The by far most successful of those, Firefox, is certainly used predominantly on Windows by a very wide margin; and its devs tend to treat Linux like a 2nd class citizen for quite some time (notably, now, also due to things which are fairly specific to Linux – the relatively poor state of its GFX stack).
The other very successful example, Open/Libre Office, almost certainly ends up, in practice, mostly as a Windows software, too (I mean, the three countries I frequent are supposedly at the top of its adoption, at 20+% – while Linux has minuscule share in them …just like, well, everywhere)
Probably similar with Audacity and Handbrake, though it’s much harder to gauge those (but I believe most questions / suggestions pertaining to Audacity on Hydrogenaudio tend to deal with Windows; and somewhat related, particularly to Handbrake and how its often used to transcode for portable devices: consider how it seems most tools to “tweak” Android handsets are… Windows apps)
The one “less multiplatform” (but still) example, Ardour, essentially makes its own audio backend – seemingly also to isolate it from tumultuous Linux audio developments.
So I’m not really sure what were you trying to say, other than provide support for views of parent posters…
Yeah, one can find Linux distro pet projects supposedly meant for pretty much anything …and that’s it / somehow they aren’t very adopted.
Not sure what is your point. I cited open source software with which the OP might be familiar, regardless of his/her platform. Perhaps you are not aware that Linux is also open source (with the open source, “mad” developers).
Well, as an OS, Windows probably has the most users, so it will have probably have the most Firefox users. Again, what is your point?
Huh? Don’t know to what you are referring. Nothing wrong with Firefox graphics on Linux.
See Windows answer above. Again, your point?
Three countries are not the world.
Please explain how anyone confirm the rate of Linux adoption.
Still not sure what is your point.
I included Ardour because it now works on Macs, and the poster to which I responded seemed Mac-centric.
Any Linux audio developments that seem “tumultuous” are usually the result of cutting edge distros including audio software without thorough testing. HINT: Newbies should use the more stable distros.
By the way, audio can be exceedingly “tumultuous” on Windows and Macs:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Search/en-US/windows?query=audi…
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/search.jspa?peopleEna…
I was pointing-out that open source developers (surely the poster wasn’t referring to Linux kernel developers) create great stable software that everyone can use. They are not “mad” nor (necessarily) “playing around.”
Yeah, audio only works on “pet projects” such as Debian Squeeze and RHEL.
In addition, what does adoption rate have to do with anything? Open Office works just as well on Ubuntu Studio (a multimedia “pet project”) as it does on stock Ubuntu.
Edited 2012-02-14 01:19 UTC
In your quest of dragging it on, sentence by sentence, you seem to continue ignoring the context at hand.
The context was NOT “open source software” – but specifically Linux, the dynamics of Linux as a desktop platform, and its developers (in a thread about what is roughly the Linux DE; coincidentally somewhat filled with complaints about it).
NOT about multiplatform (mostly even used on Windows) OSS software, short list of which you gave – but about things like Unity, GNOME 3, GStreamer, or Pulseaudio.
Whether or not the views (expressed by posters above) about them are valid is irrelevant – your software list hardly addresses those areas (but sure, if you shuffle context to your liking you might prove virtually anything)
But BTW, you seriously missed how Firefox gets GPU acceleration in a… staged manner, across platforms?
How “everywhere” IS the world?
How the tumultuous “cutting edge distros including audio software without thorough testing” drag on for YEARS? (but it’s telling how you also throw in essentially a Tu quoque logical fallacy there, when pointing out how Windows or Mac also can have problems)
And limited adoption does tend to be indicative, yes (after all, for some reason you listed mostly OSS projects which are quite adopted)
Sorry about the fallacies revealed when one’s argument is broken-down sentence-by-sentence.
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of the term “Linux.”
“Linux” is merely an OS kernel, which is why I said that the OP surely must not have been referring to literal Linux. I think that we agree that the context of this sub-thread is desktop software that is used on top of Linux, which is most accurately described as “open source,” and which is, consequently, multi-platform and not limited to use with only the Linux kernel.
However, there really is no single entity that can qualify as “Linux as a desktop platform” — there are too many desktops and window managers (and graphic systems) that can run on top of the Linux kernel to make a definitive statement about the “dynamics” of a Linux desktop. Nor can one make an overall definitive statement about the developers of such varied desktops and window managers
Most of the complaints about “the Linux desktop” are from people who do not comprehend that there is no such thing as THE Linux desktop.
Unity, GNOME 3, GStreamer, and Pulseaudio are all multi-platform and can run on Windows.
So, yes, I had the context correct, and the poster who referred to the “mad Linux developers” was actually referring to open source, multi-platform desktop/window-manager developers. Of course, the poster could have just been referring to the developers of Gnome, but Gnome is just one of many GUIs that work with Linux — one cannot draw a general conclusion about Linux GUIs merely from one desktop system.
Again, my context was correct — this sub-thread is about open source desktop/window manager software/developers, both of which are too numerous to make a definitive, characterizing argument or complaint.
Perhaps you could link a supporting page detailing the inferiority of the Linux implementation of Firefox.
You singled-out “three countries.” Have you missed how things can be very different from one country to the next?
Again, please explain how you can draw a definitive and accurate conclusion about Linux usage statistics.
Perhaps you missed the point about the numerous available distros which are stable, and do not have the alleged “tumult.”
The linked Windows and Mac problems are merely incidentals which demonstrate to the complainers that other platforms are no better. You can label such an argument as a “tu quoque,” nevertheless, the Windows/Mac audio problems linked are facts, and the argument is valid.
“Indicative” of what? Again, what is your point in that regard?
Edited 2012-02-14 09:46 UTC
“No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail.”
Yes, when your rhetoric boils down to such splitting (especially of posts including ~”BTW, things to consider”), when you limit your perception down to sentence-by-sentence like that, you lose the big picture; focus on seeking out, bending and contriving things you merely think the post says – we have clear examples of this in the above sub-thread, starting with http://www.osnews.com/permalink?506972 (how you jump from devs of Linux desktop – the context here – ecosystems, to your list of very general OSS software, and can’t let it go)
But, apparently, pointing out how one of your arguments lies outside the actual context of discussion is a logical fallacy to you, that’s also telling…
You chose one of the most popular software examples – evidently the level of overall user dynamics does matter to you.
Yeah, sure, joke yourself into thinking that anybody in the discussion at hand means kernel when referring to Linux – not Linux desktop.
Go ahead, mention OSS applications in general, and not those most representative in context – you specifically chose apps which aren’t GNOME applications, which have different user & dev dynamics from them.*
Heck, you seem to readily forget how you yourself (in this news discussion http://www.osnews.com/permalink?506964 ) call GNOME efforts retarded (the context here, and GNOME being more “the Linux desktop” than anything) – denigrating it in a much stronger way than any of the posts in the sub-thread above do, posts which you supposedly take issue with.
* What, you seriously think that the platform of vast majority of users has no influence on devs?
Look how there’s a story, right above this one, about FF adopting Metro… and yet, no such story about GNOME 3 guidelines or Unity.
And, what you didn’t seem to realize – Tu quoque was particularly telling (and funny) there, because it basically said something like “Linux doesn’t really have such problems …and besides, Win & Mac also has them!”
Edited 2012-02-20 00:16 UTC
Yep. That’s one of the main reasons I no longer use Linux after using it exclusively for many years. The audio debacle is actually a good example.
First there was OSS. It was a bit crufty, but it had lots of drivers and most chipsets were pretty well supported. The main limitation was that it could only handle one output at a time by default. So Gnome and KDE both had audio servers that could do software mixing. The problem was, this introduced quite a bit of lag, so I usually turned them off and just dealt with the fact that only one program could play sound at any one time.
At some point there was dmix, which allowed OSS to do hardware mixing. This was tricky to set up, but once it was working, it worked pretty well.
Then came a new wave of developers. OSS was too old and not quite free enough, so they created ALSA. At some point I made the switch (or my system decided to switch defaults in an upgrade) and I repeated the sound struggle. How to find the correct configuration that allowed mixing, and low latency playback? Some apps were ported to ALSA, some apps you had to switch backends, and some apps only supported OSS and you needed the ALSA OSS wrapper. Eventually it stabilized and sound worked again.
I was a Qt user, so at some point some KDE folks figured they needed an easier way to do multimedia, so they made Phonon, which would use various backends to play the stuff and just present a nice abstract API. Well that unleashed the next set of problems. Which backend to use? Gstreamer? Xine? VLC? All of them came with different problems. I used Xine, which seemed to have the fewest, but again it was complete upheaval.
Then came pulseaudio, which was again an unmitigated disaster. Luckily by then I was already on my way out. I had bought an iMac for a consulting project where I needed a Mac machine for development, and I never looked back. Sorry Linux, dicking around with configuration and every minute detail is fun for a while as you learn, tolerable for a while longer, and eventually just a pain in the butt. The Mac gives me access to Unix with a stable base that “just works”. I ain’t going back.
Edited 2012-02-13 05:53 UTC
I’ve never had any problem whatsoever with sound on KDE.
Put simply, it “just works”.
Edited 2012-02-13 08:45 UTC
I’ve never had any problem whatsoever with sound on KDE.
Put simply, it “just works”.
Yeah right! Over the last few days I have tried both Linux Mint and Mepis. Guess what? Sound is broken on both of em. It’s probably fine on a normal stereo setup “and I’ve never tried HDMI or Digital out” but analogue surround sound is broken badly! The only way you can get the subwoofer to work is manually switching between 5.1 and 7.1 or whatever while a track is playing, problem is once the current track finishes it kills the sub and you have to do it again!
This is on a X-fi card on my media system and a Auzentech card on my main system, both 5.1 analogue surround sound.
“It just works” MY ASS!
Have you tried filing a bug report?
Filing a bug report does not change the fact that it currently does not work.
well the wonderful thing about bugs is they can be fixed.
QT user?
It sounds like the cause of the comlaint in this part of the thread is actually that some users have a tendency to totally rely on defaults chosen by the distro/desktop developers, without trying other settings/configurations.
Windows and Mac has even bigger problems with this tendency — when the developers screw up, 90% of the clueless userbase suffers.
You are aware that there are other options for your desktop environment, right?
XFCE and E17 come to mind (I use both with no problem). As a bonus, they consume significantly less ressources than the two aforementioned bloatware (KDE and Gnome).
Never heard of that. Did you try a live CD from a non-Gnome distro?
Or just try another Linux distro… perhaps one of the media-centric ones.
nevermind
Edited 2012-02-15 10:11 UTC
Software devs like to re-engineer. More so in OSS world.
Gnome ditched the rock stable 2.x when it was the most usable. KDE ditched 3.5.x when it was the most stable. If KDE ditches KDE4 tomorrow and goes for an all new set of structure before the currently stable platform becomes rock solid, I would be the least surprised.
Focus on stability seems to be no one’s top priority.
A longer commitment to a platform could do a lot better for Linux users than fiddling with half-baked technology for the fancy of the devs.
We have seen examples of Pulse, Plasma, Beagle, Tracker store, Strigi, Nepomuk etc. and yet to see Wayland(I presume no remote X).
This Re-engineering really sucks.
I don’t think it’s that OSS devs are any more inclined to want to re-engineer things. That’s an impulse most developers have. The difference is in the commercial world I can tell my developers not to and they don’t. In the OSS world people just go and do it.
New technology and re-engineering doesn’t always means that the end result will be less stable, or that the system will be “unstable”. Quite the contrary, specially when it comes to software development and new developments.
It depends quite a lot in the skills of the programmers, and if the new code base is already relying on solid and stable technologies, libraries, backends. etc.
In the case of Wayland, they’re not rewriting things from scratch. Read their FAQ before spreading FUD:
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
Basically, they’re throwing away things that doesn’t work and keeping things that work. They’re building on top of things that worked for years: GEM, TTM, KMS, Linux, etc. And they’re starting with a new fresh protocol that is simple and to the point. This is great engineering.
There are cases with projects when the old code base have bugs and leaks, and replacing those parts with new code often can result in a more stable system and better performance.
Heck, how many times have we seen projects that replace other projects with new code and they end up being a lot more stable? Git vs Subversion, anyone?
Wayland developers are even talking about adding reconnection to applications when the compositors go away or crash. This will improve stability a lot.
Please let’s not be so negative, I know how you feel but things are improving and changing, and this is needed for the Linux desktop to grow.
Edited 2012-02-13 09:47 UTC
Wait, KMS has worked for years? There are *still* machines that it crashes every time.
Do you file bug reports about that? Please do.
Yes, it does perfectly. Tested on various graphics chipsets from Intel, nVidia and ATI.
If it doesn’t work for you, it means that either your hardware is buggy or you’re using a deprecated kernel version (< 2.6.32).
Seriously, KMS is absolutely mature. If you spot a bug, please be so kind and report it!
Adrian
I really don’t dislike Wayland. It skips one of my use-cases, That is remote desktop. I have been using remote rendering of X since long and with satisfaction. If tomorrow OpenSUSE defaults exclusively to Wayland (That’s our pet distro) or KDE switches to it, I am in serious trouble if remoting code does not come to Wayland before the switch.
See Wayland faq http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
My point of view is that every software project repeats a design cycle. But to adopt a new strategy even before you finish the previous goal is not professional. Goals for an iteration should be complete before you switch on to a new structure. Just don’t leave users midway because you got a fancy for a new architecture.
Porting is really painful. Many good apps get lost in the switch. We don’t have an army of developers fed by big money and directed by corporate vision. In OSS world we create software for ourselves. The end user is just like a family member. Let’s think from his point of view. Backward compatibility is a necessary evil. If devs switch to every new and promising architecture and the old falls out of the ecosystem eventually, the community is at a loss. It is a social responsibility.
Not every new architecture brings robustness immediately. Search tracker-store and nepomuk using 100% cpu in google. Let’s also see the bug status of popular projects (Libreoffice, KDE, Gnome). It needs a lot of time and testing to build robustness. What happens to the user till such time? he is left with a plethora of half baked software in the name of choice. will anyone care?
Wayland is just a protocol, why add networking to such a good protocol that is trying to keep itself simple, why make the protocol bloated and an unmaintainable mess like X11?
Wayland is trying to follow the UNIX philosophy of “Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.”.
But that doesn’t mean that Wayland will kill network transparency, network transparency will be part of another layer, it will be part of the compositors, toolkits, or we can just use X11 on top of Wayland.
Having network transparency as another layer also benefits the users and developers. It benefits the user because if you don’t want network transparency you can just choose to disable that layer on your system. And if you want it, enable it. This is also very good for security.
It also benefits the community and developers because it will result on a system that is easier to maintain, it will give us modularity, competition, elegance, KISS/UNIX philosophy, among other things.
Don’t worry about it. Nobody will remove any functionality, things are just improving.
From the Wayland FAQ:
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
Edited 2012-02-13 21:44 UTC
Why your focus is just Wayland? not other software?
Currently the situation about wayland is quite nascent. The X may be a mess, but is also quite usable. Wayland will remove a lot of bloat out of X (no proxying). The majority should not run remoting code on their personal system. It is good logic and we welcome it. Still it can’t replace X in its current specifications(specs will take a lot of time to be complete). X11 is java’s focus still, not Wayland.
For remote X you are limited to do a RDP style remoting. What about people who use remote X today? If we are looking at a stable and complete Wayland with X on top for remoting, am I looking at a future approx 3~4 years? Till that time I have to be with X. My worry is that the current X may fall out of maintenance if the focus of development goes to “Beyond X”
[[http://www.osnews.com/story/25608/Wayland_beyond_X]]
[[http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Wayland-Beyond-X-1432046.html]]
Wayland toolkit page says frankly, it is a work in progress.
[[http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html]]
The KDE Wayland strategy presentation is here.
[[http://community.kde.org/images.community/0/01/KWin_Wayland.pdf]]
The question comes : Was Microsoft always right? investing in RDP, Metro, Aero, .net and we follow head-fast ditching our working software for Wayland, New Gnome app framework, Plasma(not an exact counterpart though), mono.
“we want them to be attractive and a delight to use”
And here I was, thinking that an application’s purpose is to help us getting the job done… silly me!
Of course some applications are better designed than others, and some just get in the way, but I’ve never *ever* used any just because it’s a “delight to use”.
RT.
Am I the only one who dislikes the ambition to wrap simple HIG concepts around every desktop tool?
For the life of me I can not grasp why office productivity packages should adhere to the same HIG as multimedia tools. I actually *like* having apps for well delineated tasks to have specialized efficient GUIs which incorporate real-world metaphors when possible. If you have experience with music and studio equipment for instance, having virtual knobs and controls in the corresponding software is very helpful to accomplish the task without making too much of a distinction among the actual tools involved.
XMMS, audacious and the early days of winamp are examples of GUI success imho rather than failure for not adhering to general desktop HIGa. These are/were small efficient tools that present the functionality with a well tuned GUI. Rhythmbox, banshee, amarok, wmp and itunes comes across as very clunky in comparison.
I actually use GNOME 3.2 and maximize all the windows on my screen (those being Terminal, Epiphany, Evolution and sometimes Totem). So I applaud to the idea of full screen apps (specifically if decorations are still removed in “half screen” mode (when the window is maximized vertically and takes exactly half of the screen horizontally). I have a resolution of 1280×720. I even get irritated with the fact that GNOME Control Center (System Settings) can’t be maximized.
That said, I have no idea of what would be those toolbars they talk about. And I won’t use that music app.
Edited 2012-02-13 09:06 UTC
Optimizing the desktop for single maximized applications is fair (and also not that difficult), but I’d rather prefer a bigger effort in improving work with multiple windows.
First because that’s the scenario where the window manager either shows useful or gets in your way, and second because that happens to be how lots of people get their work done.
If I had to switch between maximized apps the whole day I would go mad.
The aerosnap effect is enough of a pain already. Maybe, just maybe, when I move a window upwards I just want it to move and not to maximize.
How about not trying to be so smart about how things would work best for me and giving me instead the tools to arrange things according to my needs?.
It’s a shame that the major Linux DEs are following the very same trends that made me loathe the Windows desktop.
Edited 2012-02-13 10:50 UTC
Users should focus on one app at a time? That’s laughable.
Maximized by default (regardless if it’s all or some)? That’s laughable.
Here’s a thought… Let the users decide what their needs/wants are. Let them determine their preferred default behavior. Let them decide how many apps they “should” focus on.
Here’s a tip Gnome devs… Great UI design is one which lets the user do what they want, without getting in the way. If you need something to work on, there are tons of other things plaguing Linux that need attention.
ilovebeer,
“Here’s a thought… Let the users decide what their needs/wants are. Let them determine their preferred default behavior. Let them decide how many apps they ‘should’ focus on.”
+1 because this should be self evident, although I’m afraid it will fall on deaf ears. I don’t mind GNOME 3 trying out new interfaces, but the inflexible & conformist way it’s being shoved onto users is very disturbing – particularly when the new paradigm is quite a bit worse for many of us.
Who would have guessed a few years ago that rich multitasking interfaces would be dumped in favor of extreme minimalistic consumption UIs on the desktop? Granted these transitions are being heavily criticized by users today, but if they are successful the productivity desktop will have been reduced to a niche market.
“Here’s a tip Gnome devs… Great UI design is one which lets the user do what they want, without getting in the way.”
You should CC all other UI devs as well.
Edited 2012-02-13 18:06 UTC
especially the music player. I wish something like that would be done for windows… I hate WMP, and every other player I have tried is just as bad.
I work with windows though… but gnome shell sure is nice. I also use all windows maximised all the time. It’s much better that way.
Edited 2012-02-13 17:04 UTC
I don’t want full screen all the time. I want easily managed tiling. If a window doesn’t have a full screen’s worth of information, let it go to the side. I’ve had Compiz-driven desktops set up to where the numeric keypad plus the Windows key put windows in a corner or along an edge. The placement on the screen mirrored the placement of the numeric keys themselves, dividing the screen into a tic-tac-toe board. Double-taps on those keys toggled 1/3rds or 2/3rds of the screen width or height. Windows-5 was full screen. Elsewhere, I eased switching between Mac and Linux desktops by keeping Windows-M for minimize and Windows-Shift-M for toggling vertical maximization.
For me, this is intuitive and super-fast. It minimizes the need for a mouse or a trackpad. Support the tablets, but don’t cripple the desktop doing it!
Edited 2012-02-13 18:43 UTC
Looks like they’ve got iPad on the brain.
Gnome 3.x is the wrong direction for Linux Desktop Environments. Many older boxes video chips are incapable of outputting the pixel #’s required by Gnome 3.x to even function properly and it reminds me and many others of a crass attempt to mimic a Windows 7 or 8 desktop environment while sacrificing older systems and what a vast majority of Linux users liked with the Gnome 2.3x Desktop Environment.
The troubling aspect for me with Gnome 3.x DE is that older boxes appear to be compatible with KDE’s newest desktop environment which presumably is every bit as glitzy and kitchen sink heavy as Gnome 3.x yet developers managed to do so without overtaxing video chip capability’s in the process.
I fully agree with a previous comment regarding LXDE compared to the extremely video intensive heavy Gnome 3.x, LXDE is lighter, faster and way more user friendly to quickly (and easily) adjust and setup imo than Gnome 3.x.
I’m not sure if the Gnome 3.x development team was trying to emulate Win 7 or Win 8 but they widely missed the mark in regards to the continued popularity of the Gnome desktop environment. Numbers of a DE ultimately impact any further development of that specific desktop environment. Will people simply leave Gnome 3.x for Cinnamon, LXDE, Trinity, KDE or move to a open platform desktop environment like the Razor-qt super-fast, lightweight and minimalist approach?
Only time will tell, however unlike any hype, Gnome 3.x ain’t making it imo and folks are actively looking at DE alternatives.