GNOME developers are making various changes to the open source desktop environment that should make it more suitable for embedded environments. Future versions of GNOME will include improved compatibility with styluses and performance enhancements, according to GNOME Foundation director Murray Cumming on Friday. This will include a focus on the GTK+, a toolkit used by GNOME to create graphical user interfaces.
The big advantage of the GNOME software stack is the ease in which developers can create software with it.
ROTFL
I will have to agree with this. While I much prefer Gnome as my desktop environment over any other X11 DE, Qt is much easier to deal with not only because the API is more complete and easier to learn, but also because the full monty of tools are available from a single source and because it has the best documentation available. Until Gnome moves to something like GTK#, with ALL the needed tools in one place and a FULL documentation, Qt will still be a better choice for any developer who values his time. But as a user, I do prefer Gnome as it has better usability.
As for Gnome in the embedded space, there is already GPE for PDAs, but it’s extremely unstable.
Until Gnome moves to something like GTK#, with ALL the needed tools in one place and a FULL documentation, Qt will still be a better choice for any developer who values his time. But as a user, I do prefer Gnome as it has better usability.
Yeah..and with RedHat and Sun entrenched in Gnome, that’s not going to happen while Java continues to be almost non-existant on the open source desktop, much to the chagrin and work of aforementioned corporates.
Yeah..and with RedHat and Sun entrenched in Gnome, that’s not going to happen while Java continues to be almost non-existant on the open source desktop
Java is ubiquitous on mobile devices. You might want to re-read the title of this article, because it isn’t about the desktop.
GTK+ does have very good documentation. It is a myth to say it doesn’t. However, the GNOME docs sucks!
Wow. An admitted Gnome fan (well, we already knew she was anyway) says that using Qt as a programmer takes less time.
Anyone who complains about the licensing fee for commercial Qt, please read Eugenia’s post. If you are paying the programmers working on your commercial app, the extra time taken to make something with gtk will more than offset the licensing cost of Qt.
Anyone who complains about Gnome sumbing stuff down: while I like KDE’s configurability, when I watch my grandfather use it, I see how it bites him in the butt, so there is something to be said for making decisions for your users.
My take on either side’s usual complaints about the other.
I do not know when you tried out GPE last time but with the GPE 2.7 and familiar 0.8.3 release coming close I already tried out some very nice snapshots. It seems a lot of bugfixing is going on : http://handhelds.org:8080/gpe/timeline and a lot of the known bugs seem to have been ironed out : http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/GPEToFixFor2_2e7 .
Of course I would not call it rock stable yet (and a lot depends on the platform you are using it, because remember lots of the underlaying stuff needed to be reversed engineered). Overall I got a very good impression, although some apps (especially the mediaplayer gpe-nmf) really need some extra work.
Qtopia is the standard linux framework for embedded devices
http://www.mvista.com
http://www.trolltech.com
…usually doesn’t have dualcore cpus running at 3GHz and 1GB of ram, which seems to be the minimum hardware now to have gnome perform at a bearable speed.
realy sad, it was so promising up to versin 2.4.
…usually doesn’t have dualcore cpus running at 3GHz and 1GB of ram, which seems to be the minimum hardware now to have gnome perform at a bearable speed.
realy sad, it was so promising up to versin 2.4.
No, no, no. We’re not talking about a full Gnome desktop (which in a way doesn’t exist anyway), but rather gtk+ and some other libraries. Remember, all of Gnome UI functionality is supposed to get folded back into gtk+ at some point in time…even though that talk has been going on for a quite a while now.
gtk+ has problems of its own though with its dependency on Pango which still has redraw issues; and to me it seems that this will be much more noticeable on lower performance cpus.
Last time I checked the full GNOME desktop ran fine on a celeron 366 with 256MB of ram. I don’t think there will be any problems for applications running on a embedded system.
This trolling really needs to stop. Gnome may not be the fastest environment to use on linux (Blackbox likely holds that crown), but it is certainly not as slow or resource hungry as the trolls like to pretend. Also it is improving, 2.12 is noticably faster than 2.10.
I haven’t used KDE for any length of time in years. You won’t see me offering an opinion on it based on my experiences with it back then. This whole desktop war is something I’ve never understood, and it seems to be very one sided in attacks against GNOME.
“This whole desktop war is something I’ve never understood, and it seems to be very one sided in attacks against GNOME.”
Are you kidding? Go find a thread about KDE/Qt where someone doesn’t complain about the horrible GPL. It flies both ways. I do agree with you about it being ridiculous though.
This whole desktop war is something I’ve never understood, and it seems to be very one sided in attacks against GNOME.
Cry me an ocean. You obviously haven’t read this article:
“The entire GNOME developer platform is licensed under the LGPL, which allows third party developers to build commercial closed applications with it. This is not the case with Qt [the graphical framework on which KDE is based], which is GPL. I do not doubt that paying licences for Qt is something that people considered when making their choice,” said Neary.
Now imagine if someone official from the KDE project came out and said something like that against Gnome. This thread would be about a hundred comments long by now with condemnation from all sides.
I also don’t get that comment either, because all of these companies getting involved are having to spend at least some significant resources actually trying to make GTK somewhere near credible, so it certainly isn’t free for them. A Qt license is miniscule in comparison. Considering the resources needed to actually do that for GTK the chances of these changes materialising are somewhere near zero.
Additionally, it’s also totally inaccurate. He’s trying to imply you can’t write proprietary (not commercial) applications with KDE because it is primarily GPL’d (multi-lcensing?) but then goes on to talk about Qt licenses. Look Dave, we’ve had this argument for many years, no one cares, it obviously hasn’t affected KDE’s adoption and it isn’t what developers out there care about.
“There has also been increased focus on performance and memory usage, with some very significant improvements that will show up in the GNOME desktop soon,”
Right. Come back in several years when you’ve invested in entire divisions of developers who have done nothing but optimisation work, like Microsoft have done with Windows. Even then, it isn’t perfect. This is a huge task, and you can’t just run some profiles and have it show up immediately in the next version.
“The big advantage of the GNOME software stack is the ease in which developers can create software with it. The stack has become very polished,
Yer, whatever.
and we’ve seen adoption from third parties like Nokia, VMWare, Adobe and others,”
Well, they’re using GTK and that’s about it – this doesn’t have much to do with Gnome. You only have to look and see how Adobe Acrobat doesn’t fit in to see that.
Nokia will almost certainly use GTK as a base for things, but create their own in-house proprietary stuff which they won’t contribute back and then people will whinge about it. The improvements everyone expected to materialise will either not or advance as far as an asthmatic ant with some very heavy shopping. That’s why the Linux kernel uses the GPL and Linus insists on it. Anyone who thinks that Nokia is somehow going to pump large amounts of resources into GTK so that others can create applications off the back of that for nothing is going to be very disappointed. All Nokia’s decision on GTK is about is having control – not of GTK, but of their own proprietary software. They’re wrong on that one and they’ll spend a lot of money, but that’s their decision.
There’s also the question of whether GTK, and certainly some Gnome components, will run reliably on embedded devices or not. I’d say not, especially having tried GPE and OPIE and considering how unreliable most graphical mobiles already are right now. Think of GTK# on top of that and you get the picture.
Usual Gnome/GTK marketing bumf with all the same old arguments we’ve all heard before.
[i]but create their own in-house proprietary stuff which they won’t contribute back and then people will whinge about it.[/k]
I think you are confising it with the KHTML-Apple issue.
Nokia is giving back all the sales of their product to GNOME so get the facts.
I think you are confising it with the KHTML-Apple issue.
No.
Nokia is giving back all the sales of their product to GNOME so get the facts.
No they’re not contributing all sales, and they’re certainly not contributing the code of their product to either Gnome or GTK because they simply can’t. Use your brain.
SO?
does thats botthes you?
The are just using the license, what’s the problem?
I’ll tell you, nothing, just you.
The are just using the license, what’s the problem?
You’ve hit the nail on the head there – they’re using the license. They’re not using GTK because it’s good, or because it has great development tools but simply because they think they can get away with more. That isn’t going to make GTK, or Gnome, any better. Quite the opposite in fact. Plus, in a lot of these companies, like Sun, you do tend to find a core of people who just like to do everything in C.
I just tried gnome 2.12 this week, on my Athlon XP 3000+, 1GB of ram, Geforce 6800GT with hardware accelerated drivers… it was so slow that it was difficult to place windows, because they so much jumped around when moved. I would expect that to be a sufficiently fast system. Other desktops work fine. I am not a KDE fanboy, i tried to stay away from it as long as i could for different reasons, but now i feel it is at least a compromise.
Strange,my specs are well below yours and Dropline Gnome 2.12 is very fast.I did not tweak anything.Is just standard install.It realy flies. I just love it now. Too bad I don’t use the machine too much for desktop,maybe when I will have time/money to make myself a dedicated fileserver.
qt is sufficiently slim, efficient and well designed to be used like this. i didn’t think gnome and all its fat, ugly and badly-designed components.
“The entire GNOME developer platform is licensed under the LGPL, which allows third party developers to build commercial closed applications with it. This is not the case with Qt [the graphical framework on which KDE is based], which is GPL. I do not doubt that paying licences for Qt is something that people considered when making their choice,” said Neary.
Ouch, that hurts so many KDE/Qt fanboys though
Ouch, that hurts so many KDE/Qt fanboys though
What did you expect from the Gnome Marketing Department? Since they can’t say anything good about their framework, they bash Trolltech, easy as that!
Oh, BTW: this is another lie from Mr. Neary.
Nokia did not choose Gtk for “licensing” problems. Hell, Nokia is one of the biggest software company in Europe!
Want to know they they chose Gtk? Read here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/8037
Neary, why don’t you say that the only reason big companies are choosing Gtk is because they can CONTROL it?
From the article: They chose GNOME over KDE because they figured they’d have an easier time getting their extensive changes approved by the relatively vendor-independent GNOME developers than they would dealing with Trolltech, although they have nothing against Qt and Qtopia.
It’ll be interesting to see many these big giants with conflicting goals (Sun, Novell, Nokia) all dirtying their hands within then same codebase. In a few years, Gtk will be even messier than it is now. Good luck to all.
What did you expect from the Gnome Marketing Department? Since they can’t say anything good about their framework, they bash Trolltech, easy as that!
You gotta sell your product somehow, and that’s a selling point.
Neary, why don’t you say that the only reason big companies are choosing Gtk is because they can CONTROL it?
Yes, instead of only a smaller company controlling qt.
They chose GNOME over KDE because they figured they’d have an easier time getting their extensive changes approved by the relatively vendor-independent GNOME developers than they would dealing with Trolltech, although they have nothing against Qt and Qtopia.
Yer, good luck with the politics of Gnome and GTK development, and good luck getting your patches past the GTK/Gnome “there’s no problem here” thought police. Although Nokia are perceived as corporate support for Gnome so they’ll probably get the few patches they submit accepted carte blanche, and get an awful lot more help than those poor sods who’ve actually filed bugs only to have them labelled “WONTFIX” and where precious patches are totally ignored, even criticised, and then fall by the wayside.
I’m glad I’ve had an initial warning here to steer clear of any of Nokia’s offerings in the future.
Thom Holwerda what are you ? Some GNOME drone ?
How much money does OSN get from GNOME ?
Sad, sad little boy. Another example of a KDE fanboy throwing a tantrum.
this article written by some gnome zealot is pure FUD against KDE.
is OsNews an affiliate of Gnome Fondation ?
If you want to read more KDE related content, why don’t you submit it?
I’m a software developer and am actually pretty good. Neither API nor language has prohibited me from writing a program once I’ve set my mind to. As much as I love Gnome and would to contribute, however, I am stymied at each step by both a lack of documentation and a nagging itch every time I look at the Gtk+ API itself.
I wanted to program for Gnome so much that I bought two books on Gnome programming (Havoc’s and someone else’s). Each time I’d go through the book, something about Gtk+ would severely grind at me. There’s so much inconsistency in function naming and object use. If you’ve gotten used to thinking of everything as objects, you get irritated by the way linked lists are treated very differently.
Just my Can$0.02
Perhaps the GNOME libraries would feel more natural to you with a binding to an object-oriented language. While the GNOME developers have managed to make most of their framework object-oriented through the use of libraries, C does not provide the syntatic sugar to make writing object-oriented code in C too pleasurable.
The following bindings are mature and may be more to your liking:
C++: http://www.gtkmm.org/
Python: http://www.pygtk.org/
Java: http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/bin/view
C#: http://www.mono-project.com/GtkSharp
Ruby: http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/
Good luck!
That is excellent news. Big thanks to Openedhand for sponsoring this work.
These are my specs.I have this machine since 3 years now : P4 2.4 1GB RAM , nv Ti4600 . Dropline is blazing fast .In 2.12 you can see it now.2.10 was a bit sluggish when you tried to open the menu.
KDE also flies.But is not my style.I have nothing against or for it. It just doesn’t push any button.
Gtk DOES have good documentation although I feel much more comfortable with Qt but then again , I don’t do C/CPP dev anymore.For java I feel better with the new NetBeans and Windows.Its just faster,I don’t know why and I don’t want to look into.
Whos’s saying these days that Gnome is slow must change that P2 they have from ’98. Or don’t use it at all. I know that on my laptop (P3-900) until I added another 256MB ram WinXP was extremely slow.And I’m talking Win Apps (office and stuff).
Look! Some people just can’t even use their 3Ghz and 1Gb of RAM! I always watched with bitter irony how people bought some top-of-the-line machine to work *slower* than a properly nourished Windows XP installation on a Celeron 1.4Ghz with 512 MB of RAM. Seems a user can screw up pretty much any OS or DE and complain afterwards.
PS Jumping windows is definitely something screwed in the install, nothing to do with Gnome’s alleged “slowness”.
It is a standard suse install with nothing tweaked or changed. How could i possibly f–ked that up? By looking to hard on it?
It is a standard suse install with nothing tweaked or changed. How could i possibly f–ked that up? By looking to hard on it?
Well, Gnome on Suse is just not that great still. You also have to consider that these posts claiming that dropline Gnome works wicked fast on *insert average sounding hardware here* are just lies. Anyone who’s used Gnome for fifteen minutes, let alone all the time, can see there’s a problem. Some of these people have some seriously incredible glasses and we just have to accept that a few of them do exist.
Dunno if you can change the mess found in the GNOME architecture by using new Icons ?
Eyecandy can be done by everyone and there are tons of nice Icon- and Theme sets on various Theme sites.
But fixing the broken framework of GNOME should be the primary thing to do imo. Fixing all the broken components and applications should be a primary thing as well.
Nothing really works inside GNOME, even core applications are not following the HIG v2.0 (Toolbar of Gnumeric doesn’t follow the Toolbar & Menus capplet), Evolution is broken because it crashes during startup and trashes all syncfiles for local mailboxes, Nautilus still not usable, copying files using Nautilus is still broken, DIA is not usable, Abiwords toolbar is by far 5 pixels bigger than the rest of GNOME’s toolbars, Evince is permanently crashing and quite unusable because of this.
It also shows empty white pages and printing will result in printouts getting different fonts (reported bug), Rhythmbox crashes with GStreamer, Rhythmbox is quite immature compared to KDE’s amaroK.
There are no proper business tools for doing stuff like UML, charts, project management, computer related diagrams, electronic circuit design. The tools don’t really integrate and look awful.
MONO will split the entire GNOME community, not to mention that MONO is not portable to any other architecture such as PowerPC, SPARC and so on, so most MONO apps are quite useless.
Embedded device and GNOME ? Together with MONO, JAVA, PYTHON, PERL, RUBY as necessary requirements … pfffff…..
Nothing really works inside GNOME, even core applications are not following the HIG v2.0 (Toolbar of Gnumeric doesn’t follow the Toolbar & Menus capplet)
I’ve never really understood Gnome’s HIG, because there’s a lot of stuff in there developers have to do rather than just inheriting it from base desktop components.
Evolution is broken because it crashes during startup and trashes all syncfiles for local mailboxes, Nautilus still not usable, copying files using Nautilus is still broken, DIA is not usable, Abiwords toolbar is by far 5 pixels bigger than the rest of GNOME’s toolbars
Disclaimer: I don’t know too much about that simply because I haven’t used Gnome apps enough. I’ll have to install a Gnome desktop and find out and use it full-time. Yes, I’ve encountered problems when I’ve used Gnome recently but the only way you really find out is by using it all the time. The last time I used Evolution full-on was four years ago and it was OK.
Rhythmbox is quite immature compared to KDE’s amaroK.
Definitely. Amarok kicks serious ass. You can tell the development framework is there because they can focus on adding useful stuff like audio scrobbler support.
MONO will split the entire GNOME community, not to mention that MONO is not portable to any other architecture such as PowerPC, SPARC and so on, so most MONO apps are quite useless.
As anyone should know I’m not a Mono fan for reasons I’ve described and won’t go into here. However, to be fair they have had Mono up and running on SPARC and PowerPC, so that isn’t really accurate. I’ve no idea how complete they are, but they’ve done it.
Embedded device and GNOME ?
Well, it’s more like embedded devices and using a certain amount of GTK. That’s what Nokia look as if they’re doing here. Good luck to them I say because graphical embedded devices are already as bloated, slow and unstable as it is right now.
Segedunum wrote:
I don’t know too much about that simply because I haven’t used Gnome apps enough. I’ll have to install a Gnome desktop and find out and use it full-time. Yes, I’ve encountered problems when I’ve used Gnome recently but the only way you really find out is by using it all the time.
For someone who doesn’t even use GNOME, you certainly have a lot of opinions about it: you’ve written five comments to this GNOME-story alone.
I for one find this really exciting. Many companies are cooperating on GNOME development and promoting the GNOME platform. GNOME is being slimmed down and optimized on many fronts, and the embedded space is the next logical target. Exciting times.
For someone who doesn’t even use GNOME, you certainly have a lot of opinions about it: you’ve written five comments to this GNOME-story alone.
I don’t use it nine to five, five days a week, which is what I meant if you’d actually read. That’s how long you really need to use something for. And you don’t use Gnome for that length of time either incidentally.
However, I’ve used it for long enough and in enough scenarios to make a reasonable guess as I’ve had to make a desktop choice for people that isn’t going to embarrass the hell out of me. Why haven’t I used it, or had anyone else use it, for five days a week, nine to five? Because I’ve realised it isn’t good enough long before I get to that stage.
I for one find this really exciting. Many companies are cooperating on GNOME development and promoting the GNOME platform.
Are they really co-operating on Gnome, or are they using Gnome and GTK simply as a crap base to then go off and do their own thing? None of this is going to make Gnome or GTK any better. Tons of resources aren’t miraculously going to appear out of nowhere to make them better. These are the very same open source projects that were meant to get people away from this in so many ways.
GNOME is being slimmed down and optimized on many fronts
Whatever.
and the embedded space is the next logical target.
You need something that actually runs on a desktop, nevermind an embedded device.
Are they really co-operating on Gnome, or are they using Gnome and GTK simply as a crap base to then go off and do their own thing? None of this is going to make Gnome or GTK any better. Tons of resources aren’t miraculously going to appear out of nowhere to make them better. These are the very same open source projects that were meant to get people away from this in so many ways.
Wow, you sound like a real GNOME hater and KDE slave.
an advice, get off GNOME threats they just makes you look bad or try to get attention from relatives.
You really need some help, get some fresh air or a life.
The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.
Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.
Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn’t touched for a really long time. There wasn’t even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.
But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it’s quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.
Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like “specifications” as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it’s a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature – and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.
For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say /opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can’t move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.
Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it’s path inside GNOME but still it doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.
Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on ‘dead ideas’ they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get’s lost with playground stuff.
We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.
It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don’t care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.
GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.
Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can’t be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.
It’s also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whole document correctly with correct fonts but as soon as I start printing one page out of it messes the fonts totally up (looks like monotype fonts when printed).
It’s the release team to take care of what they include inside GNOME, if the stuff is still immature or not working properly then it should by all means be avoided for inclusion since it doesn’t help anyone. GNOME is often claimed to be the desktop to get work done. But I often find myself to do more work in fixing stuff around GNOME rather than getting work done. Printing job applications usually ends the way that I switch into console and print over ghostscript using cups rather than trusting gnome-print or evince (which fault this is I don’t know but a confirmed bugreport exists).
As a corporate desktop I urgently require reliable tools and I require these tools today and not – one day. Look DIA, Nautilus, Evolution and many other tools exists for years now and DIA is nowhere to be usable and I often tried giving them a helping hand which I got ugly repsonses from the maintainers.
This does help the corporate idea how ? In no ways does this help anything. I do find the “Tango Project” and “Better Desktop” to be a nice thing but I somehow got the feeling that it’s just a reaction towards the plasma project that KDE offers.
Unfortunately in my opinion the KDE people do make a better figure with what they announce because most of the stuff they do works. Sure, not perfectly and sometimes you have quirks and other issues inside KDE as well but the tools exists to get work done. You don’t need to think about does it print correctly. It simply does. You don’t need to worry about Kivio or Umbrella not working correctly they simply do make a better shape than DIA for example.
KDE may look overwhelming complex and overloaded in the eyes of inexperienced people but in other peoples minds it looks just right and offers all the stuff one really needs without worrying.
I don’t say that these things won’t show up for GNOME one day but I can tell you from personal experiences that developing for GNOME is a nightmare.
As initially said you can easily move a final compiled KDE binary system from one dir to another and have the stuff work perfectly and perfectly find the datafiles. GNOME doesn’t offer that.
KDE has objects for Toolbars. That is, if you put that Toolbar object in your window then you have all the aditional features for it as well such as editing Toolbars, such as the same height, same objects and same icons inside. GNOME unfortunately doesn’t offer that, every application looks differently, look at VMWare for example which is using GTK+ now. Look at the Menu it has a draghandle, now look in what GNOME or GTK+ apps exists that have a draghandle there ? It uses GTK+ – yes but it feels differently.
The HIG for GNOME sounds like a joke and if you point people with the finger on the HIG and say ‘hey would you please adopt these things’ then you get a response telling you that the HIG is incomplete or lacks thought in these areas and so they can not apply the HIG to their app – which imo is a bad excuse. The HIG is meant so people follow guides, but not meant that people do change the HIG so it fits the applications (developers) bad excuses.
The computer is a toy that you should use but not have the computer use you (to explain the HIG situation a bit differently).
Now if you count all the stuff together that I mentioned (RB, GStreamer, Evolution, Nautilus, broken gnome-vfs, Toolbar issues, and many more (and I bet you found tons of annyances on your own and again others do so too)) then all these annoyances summed up results in the conclusion that GNOME is not well thought through and way behind it’s competition.
Good marketing surely helps and a site such as OSNews.com who regularey promote GNOME and ignore KDE (on purpose) may help GNOME too (and money stuffed in the throaths of those news sites help too) but in reality this is all masquerading and not really helpful. If people want to live behind lies and accept these to be ok then be it like this but it’s not my way of thinking.
Sure this is all about open source and everyone can do whatever he want’s but we talk about a corporate desktop here.
About KDE’s complexity again. It’s complex because they offer complex stuff.
For example a certificate manager, IDE, Webdevelopment, Games, Education stuff (with useful things inside like maths, vocabulary and so on), UML, Fax Software, Printing Software, Reader, Internet Download Manager, Browser, Newsreader, Mail client, Instant Messenger, Remote Desktop connection, amarok, k3b, koffice (kivio, krita, kword, kspread, kpresenter and so on), task juggler and many many more apps. The majority of the things I mentioned above is already part of KDE. You most likely don’t need these things but another one will and if you don’t need these things today then you might do one day and then you will be thankful for these tools to exists and be there.
And I don’t doubt that if GNOME would have these things then they would all bundle it as ‘The GNOME’ if they can. This probably also explains the huge success of Ubuntu which ships all of that. People don’t necessarily need them today but they probably will one day.
But with KDE I get these things and most of these tools are far more advanced and far better implemented using a solid ground architecture. The toolbars are all similar using the same technology, the printing dialogs are all the same, they all smoothly build up on the same good solid architecture that KDE offers.
I don’t say that the majority of applications found for GNOME are bad, no way. But I believe due to the architecture that GNOME offers these applications are not mature enough or not thought through well enough. These applications could have been better and more coherent if the gound architecture of GNOME wouldn’t allow half a dozen of Toolbar types for example (and this from libraries that hopefully will be considered non existing soon).
The problem of GNOME’s bad framework causes that all the GNOME applications that exists do look differently, behave differently, react differently on global preferences changes. Also stuff like proper clipboard support for GNOME is lacking (maybe these things are included in a distribution) but then huge work went inside the distro to achieve this goal. But I am refering here to the GNOME that exists on CVS or which get released through tarballs.
GNOME would suck less if the ground architecture would simply work. That basic things like windows, toolbars, menus would be done in ONE WAY rather than 20 different ways, that tools like Glade should be re-invented properly and not this poor thing that people keep designing their dialogs with and where properties inside the *.glade files are set inproperly and wrong. GNOME would also suck less if it had a global plugins system such as Kioslave or KParts. Bonobo is so what complex that no real documents exists. So instead writing plugins or snapins so other apps inside GNOME can use it. People keep writing new libraries and make all the apps depend on these libraries because its the easier solution for them to solve this task. A plugins pool where apps could grab a working object and register it with their programs would have been a better choice imo.
What annoys the hell out of me are the basic tasks that GNOME can not really acomplish, it fails with simple things. Things that you usually shouldn’t think about because you expect the stuff to simply work and to get your work done. That’s the area where GNOME lacks and even small things such as a clipboard manager is announced on OSNews.com like its the biggest invention in century while other competition desktops such as KDE offer these things for years as it’s natural thing to have. People and even developers in the GNOME camp keep pridefully arguing how much KDE’s implementations do suck. But hey, they at least have these things.
GNOME is a never ending pit, where you keep working on fixing even trivial things and this is a never ending story, you keep ranting and flaming about these things for years and now years have passed and those things still make slow progress. And still the same people have nerves declaring GNOME as the standard default corporate desktop. While it lacks in so many areas.
Now that even trivial tasks can be a nightmare inside GNOME how does it look if you deal with huge complex stuff. Ever thought about that.
In case someone asks me when I last used GNOME then be sure that I do use the latest GNOME there is and that I know it good enough to be serious of what I write.
For example a certificate manager, IDE, Webdevelopment, Games, Education stuff (with useful things inside like maths, vocabulary and so on), UML, Fax Software, Printing Software, Reader, Internet Download Manager, Browser, Newsreader, Mail client, Instant Messenger, Remote Desktop connection, amarok, k3b, koffice (kivio, krita, kword, kspread, kpresenter and so on), task juggler and many many more apps. The majority of the things I mentioned above is already part of KDE. You most likely don’t need these things but another one will and if you don’t need these things today then you might do one day and then you will be thankful for these tools to exists and be there.
That’s why KDE is soooooo bloated, because they include mediocre and unfinished apps. to the base, that is a bad practice.
Amarok? pleae, like if a music player would make me more productive.
That’s why KDE is soooooo bloated, because they include mediocre and unfinished apps. to the base, that is a bad practice.
What on Earth do you think Gnome gives you? We’re talking about core apps, functionality and technology that deasn’t work – period. The cut down Gnome stuff is just an admission of how sparse and crap Gnome’s functionality set actually is.
Are you telling me people don’t want music players, a CD burning application, a selection of office suite functionality that Open Office doesn’t have and there aren’t people out there looking for a UML modeller or something they can use for remote desktop connections? I know Gnome was aiming for the simple user but bloody hell.
Amarok? pleae, like if a music player would make me more productive.
Yer. A music player is a pre-requisite on a desktop environment, and Gnome doesn’t have one up to snuff.
first this is not a gnome thread so why bicker about that
second just to bicker some more that gnome is slow is not something anyone notices heack at school we have p3 800 with 128mb ram that dualboots windows and linux with gnome, moste avreage people that i have asked feels that the gnome env is faster. so most people uses gnome in that lab.
and there are a bunch of people doing video compression reasearch with wlan and ipaq’s they tried gpe and the qtopia desktop they chosed gpe cus it worked better and where less hassel
ofcourse many people says that gnome is slow so there has to be some truth to that statment but it’s not the whole truth
Good luck cramming that elephant into a tutu.
> I for one find this really exciting. Many companies
> are cooperating on GNOME development and promoting
> the GNOME platform. GNOME is being slimmed down and
> optimized on many fronts, and the embedded space is
> the next logical target. Exciting times.
Right! And you still believe there is an easter bunny, the santa claus and probably you still dream about the tooth ferry.
Hello Ramsees2 well I must say that I’ve been following Segedunum’s comments for quite some time now and do wholeheartly agree with most of his comments made. They are valid, makes sense and are right.
I doubt that Segedunum is a GNOME hater, I think he is one of those people who truly tried both desktops, tested them excessive and concluded that GNOME simply sucks and that it is broken.
KDE is by far too mature, too advanced and offers a lot of quality programs that GNOME lacks.
And If I were you, I would stop blowing sugar up the ass of GNOME since you probably haven’t tried to contribute anything to GNOME or have dealt with insulting and agressive GNOME hackers. One day you will get heavily pissed off by one of them (which I wish to happen for everyone at least for one time) so you understand what’s up.
I think when someone describes something as a “crap base” he’s outside the realm of valid arguments, similar to saying something “simply sucks” and claiming that it is broken and offering no examples.
I do know quite a bit about dealing with GNOME developers, and while do vary from nice guys, to people who come off rather abrasive and cruel, you get that same spectrum in any sufficiently large group of people.
I can understand someone simply not caring for GNOME. I can’t understand people who seem to sit on a forum and constantly complain about something that they don’t even use, or have to use, or even look at, or think about.
What do you gain from spending all this time complaining about GNOME? If you’re trying to decrease its use or its status, please remember that all publicity is good publicity.
> I think when someone describes something as a “crap
> base” he’s outside the realm of valid arguments,
> similar to saying something “simply sucks” and
> claiming that it is broken and offering no
> examples.
I am not Segedunum but if you want good examples (most of them provided by me then please go on reading the comments given here:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=12191
You’re Ali Akcaagac then? Sorry if you aren’t, but you remind me quite strongly of him.
Lets see as far as I can tell from that comment in browsing through it, it sounds like one is less of an issue now (and will be gone completely when project ridley is completed). With all of the others its likely your attitude and tone when you post, since they seem to be complaints about the community and culture.
People don’t like to generally read long diatribes that could be summed up quickly. Especially when the tone is as harsh as you are there.
> People don’t like to generally read long diatribes
> that could be summed up quickly. Especially when
> the tone is as harsh as you are there.
Seem like everyone likes reading lengthy comments otherwise I wouldn’t be getting so much responses with wrong facts.
Besides this, I don’t think that my tone is harsh or rude. It’s just my opinion that I explain in the public and I doubt I don’t need to justify myself infront of you. I said earlier that GNOME people not just have a broken framework but I also mentioned that the community sucks due to namecalling, inflamatory replies, slandering, libel and other fine stuff (which of course isn’t stomped to the public).
Now you confirm what I say and again my credibility in this area has been proven since you mentioned my name. I don’t know where namecalling will get you or if you want to prove something or manifest some person name as some sort of ‘look that troll again’ or ‘look he is known’. See me as one person who is totally fed up about the bad practices of the GNOME development community and their asshole mentality towards others.
In case I am rude, then you can be sure that this only reflects to the whole GNOME community. But then I was taught to be like that – not from my own – but from the GNOME camp. It’s no secret and there are thousands of people outside who confirmed having had very bad experiences with GNOME developers. The one speaks about it, the other ignores it.