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I'd forgotten how bad gnome looked back in the day. Now days it looks much much better. Thanks for the working link.

GNOME team keep up the good work.

I was not able to access your file with your link as it is, but using : http://rs171l33.rapidshare.com/files/49024673/gnome.png works fine.

Why captchas if it can be far easier:

/kneel in front of the waybackmachine

I second that. I remember using it back in 2000 on Red Hat and I loved it. Awesome to see how far it has come in only a few years. Best of luck on future releases. Keep up the competition between KDE and GNOME and there is no telling how far they will both go!

yes another "me too" post, I used it with red hat 6 (I guess) it wowed me showing top lines of text files as text file icon, I said to myself that time

- this thing is something, light years ahead of windows

(year) later I removed windows 98 from my P2 240 MHz, 4GB HD, 96 RAM Toshiba laptop and installed red hat 8 and never turned back to windows... later I got P3 733 MHz, 120 GB HD, 192 RAM Compaq and installed red hat 9, skipped all Fedore to Ubuntu... then two years ago I upgraded my hardware to P3 3GHz, 120 GB (same old HD) 1 GB RAM, I got this computer only because I need vmware to run W2k which I was studying at school

me happy GNOME user

Well, this isn't a "me too" post, as I'm a relative noob who's only been using Gnome since 2.0. But screenshots just like this of early Gnome were my first glimpses of Linux. Man, I thought it was the coolest looking desktop ever! Those icons, and all that stuff at the bottom. I didn't even know anything about the OS, I just knew I wanted it on my computer.

A humbling reminder to myself to not laugh at the current noobs who want Linux just so they can have spinning cubes and flaming windows.

Me too! I started using Linux at about RedHat 7 and GNOME looked something like that. I hated it so much that I installed KDE. When GNOME 2.0 came out, I went back to GNOME and have never looked back since.

We definately have come a long way since then. I have it still running on an old Pentium III with RH 6.2. Just recently upgraded the RH 6.2 to Gnome 2.18 and you can tell there's a big difference.

I also have Gnome running on the new fedora as well. Keep up the great work.

Eh? Three times faster doing what? These older versions tend to use a lot less resources than newer ones (especially because they were built on GTK+ instead of GTK2, and thus had a lot more primitive font rendering and other features). I can see 2.18 being faster than 2.0, but faster than 1.x? How did you measure this?

Congratulations to Gnome by the way. Without it the Linux desktop world would be a lot more boring.

Edited 2007-08-15 00:39

Gnome 1.4 is slower than 2.X, e.g. Gnome 2.18?
No, this is not possible. Gnome 1.4 is definitely faster than Gnome 2.x.
I still use Gnome 1.4 (from Woody) on my old Pentium I 200 MHz notebook which has only 64MB RAM.
Would you suggest that I should install Ubuntu 7.04 with its beautiful Gnome 2.18 desktop on this machine for testing purposes and comparison with the speed of Gnome 1.4? I don't believe so.
Maybe "1.4" was a typo.

He is probably referring to 1.4 with Nautilus - anyone from then would remember what Nautilus was like using the Mozilla framework; it was buggy, slow and unreliable. Compared to then, Nautilus is rocket fast.

Yes, it must be, because it doesn't go anywhere!

I think it should be this link
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/1997-August/msg00123.html

hahah. i started using gnome around then, too. i agree... i liked it better then, as well! for a while, it seemed like each new release too away features that i liked. oh, well... i've long since dropped heavy desktops for lighter wondow managers. i'm really digging openbox these days.

sometimes XFCE reminds me of what gnome *used* to feel like.

oh, nostalgia.

[OT]

We've been through this a few hundred times already. This very same exact line could be said by by a gnome user who knows gnome, and by a kde user who knows kde. It's _not_ a valid argument, unless someone's completely uninformed of the other de's capabilities. Still, up is the way you're modded. Woot.

[/OT]

Once my desktop is configured the way I like, I rarely change it (I've got better things to do), so why should it always be staring me in the face?

Because software should do what you want it to do, and it should jump when you tell it to. On a great many occasions, certainly looking through Gnome's Bugzilla, that hasn't been the case. Features could have been debated, organised and added in ways that would not have impacted general usability and would not have 'got in the way' of anybody at all. Linus Torvalds even created some patches for his window manager configuration beefs, and there's really no reason at all why they couldn't have been integrated sensibly and in an organised way without impacting default behaviour:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408898

However, the standard answer is words to the effect of "No ordinary user would ever want to do this". I don't see any definition anywhere in Gnome's HIG or on their site that defines what an 'ordinary user' is, or does. Go on to Amazon, buy any standard usability book that people tend to use, and you will never find that phrase, or anything like it, anywhere. I guarantee it.

GNOME stays out of my way,.....It's simple, clean

Gnome can't stay out of your way. It's a desktop environment, and it should do what you want it to do at any given time. I have asked people on umpteen occasions to define what those phrases mean, and they never can.

[q]GNOME stays out of my way,.....It's simple, clean

Gnome can't stay out of your way. It's a desktop environment, and it should do what you want it to do at any given time. I have asked people on umpteen oc

I really beg to differ on that. A DE can be very intrusive. Windows Explorer can be very intrusive with it's focus stealing balloons and gaudy themes.

Mac OS X's interface is intrusive because it is meant to be looked at. It's not meant to fade into the background.

For a definition. An unintrusive DE that is clean and simple is one that is minimalistic and goes un-noticed by the user as work is performed. Modernist principles where form follows function with a lack of decoration is usually the connotation.

Then, at least to me, GNOME is intrusive.

I usually use KDE, but as GIMP is definitely better than anything in the KDE world, I use GIMP whenever it comes to photo editing.

Which brings up the topic of the "save as" file dialog. It gets in my way in a very serious manner.

First, it pops up as a small window with no filesystem tree view or file viewer. How the path is displayed (as buttons) also needs some getting used to, for long path names not the whole path is shown which is a bad thing. Better make the dialog window wider if needed!
I never have a clue, where Gimp will store the file in my filesystem. So I have to click the "filesystem browser" button, which brings up a filesystem browser which is not very well integrated into the rest of the "save as" dialog.

To put it planely: This thing uses too much brain power, getting oriented is really hard work.

I think, most people who do not like GNOME dislike it because of the file dialogs.

"Gnome can't stay out of your way. It's a desktop environment, and it should do what you want it to do at any given time. I have asked people on umpteen occasions to define what those phrases mean, and they never can."

Perhaps he wants it to stay out of his way?

"However, the standard answer is words to the effect of "No ordinary user would ever want to do this". I don't see any definition anywhere in Gnome's HIG or on their site that defines what an 'ordinary user' is, or does. Go on to Amazon, buy any standard usability book that people tend to use, and you will never find that phrase, or anything like it, anywhere. I guarantee it. "

You are right. This is currently handled as a judgement call by the maintainers. Havoc has actually pushed on more formalisation on what the target market for GNOME actually is. But even as it is, GNOME with the fuzzy idea of "ordinary user" is a more clearly defined project than most free software projects.

The main problem with integrating "your pet functionality" is that every user has their own pet functionality that does not match yours. So in order to please everyone, GNOME would have to pack in loads of features and configuration options and basically end up pleasing nobody but the "power users" that love to tweak and configure things. A horrible example is Emacs, which has so many obscure options that it is impossible to find the straightforward and simple ones.

That is why everything is weighted so carefully before integrating it. If Linus feels GNOME is too restrictive, he should just keep on using KDE, there really is no reason for him not to.

Also, there is no reason for Metacity to integrate loads of "power features", because people can just keep using sawfish or whatever window manager they please.

Once my desktop is configured the way I like, I rarely change it (I've got better things to do), so why should it always be staring me in the face?

Well, it is like that in KDE too. I usually set up my desktop the way I like it, and then very seldomly use the "control panel" again. So your argument of KDE settings taking up menu- and window-space is hard to follow. Or do you have the GConf window open all the time?

But to be able to set up everything the way I like, in KDE I do not have to read through pages and pages of a manual, to find the right keyword, try it out, see it was not the right one and go back to searching again.
I simply open the "control panel" and start looking through the tree.

For one setting, there usually are only 2 or 3 places where it could be (equivalent to the 2 or 3 keywords which could influence what I want), so finding the right place takes far less time than searching through a manual for the right keyword. Sorry, but especially dumbing down the configuration application was one of the worse ideas with GNOME 2.0 .

"""
and how laughably slow (albeit flashy) Ximian Nautilus was in comparison.
"""

That would be "Eazel Nautilus". Remember all those news stories about how the crack team (that wrote the original Mac interface!) were going to revolutionize Linux with this file manager? (A file manager is low level computer software that stores your documents and spreadsheets.)

Of course, they turned out like most poorly administered startups. They went through millions like money was going out of style, and then went belly up.

It took some more years before Nautilus was really ready. But I do like it.

Happy birthday Gnome. :-)

Ack, you're absolutely right! Curse my spotty memory!



Well said, sir. I fully agree (though I was an onlooker rather than a real developer). I've never taken sides in the DE war, but even as things stand today I'd prefer to use GNOME (or a third choice) over KDE... So long as I can dispense with icky Metacity.

Edited 2007-08-15 06:31

I remember when back in the 1.x days, being "cool" was enough to get something in to GNOME. After the massive 2.x restructuring, it took a hell of alot more. While I have remained on board all these years, I still find that they got too draconian and hierarchical during that transition. While I have loved the usable environment, I have also been watching KDE make quantum leaps forward in underlying technology, while GNOME has had a more steady evolutionary advance.

I really think at this point, GNOME has lost its way. I look at KDE4, and in about a year or so of development it looks like they not only have fixed 90% of my usability gripes, while delivering killer frameworks and APIs that compete with what the competition is shipping on the latest generation of operating systems.

I love GNOME, and have for years. While the retrospective gives you a sense of pleasant nostalgia, I only feel some sadness at leaving what was my favorite platform for many years. While I havnt been here for the full ten years, Ive been here for most of them.

I miss being able to choose your window manager;

You can still do that and run Gnome on your choice of Window Managers.

I used to run Gnome 2.14 with Openbox as Window Manager a few years back:

http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Help:GNOME/Openbox

If you really want a lighter system with the Gnome panel. You can run the Gnome panel alone on another WM. Back at Gnome 2.6 I used to run XFWM4 as window manager with the XFce session manager. I had Rox as the default file manager and used its pinboard to manage the desktop. The whole thing was set up to look pretty much like a default Gnome desktop but it ran a lot faster.

I started using Gnome 1.0 with RH 6 and I remember how proud I was of that desktop. It looked a lot better than NT 4 at work. Somewhere I have some old screenshots like that one. GMC was pretty fast compared to the later Nautilus (once upon a time the worlds slowest file manager) but it was a pain to configure just the way you want it (mimetypes etc).

Nowadays I run a pretty much out of the box desktop from Feisty.

"Well, Nautilus' speed still sucks, but at least we still have our command shells, right?"

The last version of Nautilus that ever slowed me down doing graphical file management was around Gnome 2.8 or 2.10.

Also, just because Metacity doesn't have the features you like, does not mean it is awful. It is a brilliantly designed window manager that integrates perfectly, is incredibly stable and has a sane theming and configuration system.

Pretty much the perfect window manager for people that don't care about what a window manager is, which is the majority of computer users.

It still has far more features that window managers of today's commercial operating systems.

yeah, time has proven it was a silly reason - Qt is now more free (GPL) than GTK (Lesser GPL). and it is still ahead of GTK...

Yet, Gnome did the free desktop a lot of good, leading the way in usability (not to everybody's happiness, but still) and through competition ensuring the Free desktop is better than it would have been without Gnome. So congrats on these 10 years...

This is neither the time nor the place to discuss this, but no it isn't. The GPL places more restrictions on developers than the LGPL does; hence the LGPL is a more free license.

So the BSD is more free than the GPL as well. I think it depends on your point of view. I just follow the Free Software Foundations' view where they prefer the GPL over the LGPL, even for libraries.

Still neither the time nor the place, but leave it to the KDE-zealots to ruin a perfectly good birthday party. They even brought off-topic GNOME-bashing to their own party last year:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=16177

In any given situation, the word "free" does not depend on your point of view. In this case it applies to what you can do with the code. Someone linking a proprietary program to an LGPL library doesn't deny anyone their rights. Also note that GTK+ is licensed under the Library GPL -- not the Lesser GPL.

This FSF document:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
simply states that the LGPL is inappropriate for some libraries. The LGPL-licensing of GTK+ (and supporting libraries) is in no way in conflict with that document.

I'm guessing it was an attempt to reference this:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

that was badly worded. "More in tune with the FSF's philosophies" would probably have been a better choice than "more free".

The GPL places more restrictions on developers than the LGPL does; hence the LGPL is a more free license.

Hmmmmm, well I wasn't going to reply, but that's just plain wrong, because your definition of 'free' does not correspond to the meaning of free that the FSF coined when they came up with the GPL and the LGPL.

The FSF is talking about the freedom of the code, not your freedoms. The GPL ensures that any changes that anyone else makes are available to you, and vice versa. The LGPL can be got around because people would just create proprietary extensions that would drag down the quality of the open source project, and ensure less code being contributed back in. Imagine the Linux kernel LGPLed, with people shoving binary drivers on it right, left and centre and you'd have a disaster from an open source and free code point of view - not to mention quality.

Point is, it adversely affects the integrity and identity of the project and what code should be contributed back. The LGPL has just become a poor excuse for a lot of people to say "Look, you can develop everything for nothing!" Sadly, that just isn't enough, nor are things that simple.

The FSF always intended that the LGPL should have limited use, and for reasonably good pragmatic reasons, aside from any other FSF politics or rhetoric.

Edited 2007-08-15 11:17

"Qt is now more free (GPL) than GTK (Lesser GPL)"

QT is licensed under a double license: not only pure GPL but also a commercial, proprietary license. If you want to write commercial proprietary applications with QT, GPL is not enough but you have to buy a commercial license from Trolltech. That could restrict commercial development of QT-based proprietary apps (mobile apps, games etc.).

From Wikipedia QT article:
"Proprietary commercial development requires the commercial license, and, unlike some open source software libraries, Qt is not licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and does not include a GPL linking exception."

"..you have to buy a commercial license from Trolltech. That could restrict commercial development of QT-based proprietary apps (mobile apps, games etc.)"

Riiight...and having to purchase a Visual Studio license restricts proprietary Windows software development. Gotcha.

You don't have to buy VS to develop closed-source software using Windows widgets. You do have to buy Qt to develop closed-source software using Qt widgets. That's a huge difference.

That all depends on how you look at "free".

If "free" means the fewest restrictions on use, then GNOME is far free-er than QT.

Of course, I don't expect GPL zealots to understand that you do not gain freedom by adding restrictions, so whatever...

Freedom has to be protected. Is that new to you?

Search gnome-look.org. It's a wallpaper from Foresight Linux.

Happy Birthday GNOME! Thanks for all the wonderful years.

Enjoy:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/teams/art.gnome.org/backgrounds/GNOM...

Grejt!! thank you very much