GNOME 2.0 was released less than two days ago and while I was using its betas on and off, for some time now, I was anticipating this final release with impatience. The project was supposed to see this release almost a year ago, but GTK+ 2.0 was not ready in time, dragging Gnome’s development down as well. But now it is here, so let’s see what this new release brings to the Unix desktop.
As many users pointed out in forums, the new release is mostly a rewrite of the Gnome desktop environment to the GTK+ 2.0.x API. The new version of the popular C-based API brings some nice new features, like doublebuffering, smooth resizing (with medium success I might add, when compared to MacOSX and BeOS 6-Dano’s algorithms/techniques), a nice-looking tree view, native support for anti-alias fonts and more. Gnome 1.x applications are not compatible with the new library, so in order to take advantage of these new features, the application will need to be massively updated to the new GTK+ API. Possibly this is the reason why there are not many Gnome applications yet ported to the new framework, neither the Gnome itself includes many applications or preference panels as it used to. For example, the memu panel, merely includes 3 options. Same goes for the other setting panels (when available), they lack the flexibility and number of options found in the previous version of Gnome.
The Gnome menu panel now resembles a bit of MacOS. It sits on the top of the desktop, and no matter what I tried, I can’t change its position. The window list can be found on the bottom of the screen. So, you get two gnome panels, one on the top and one on the bottom. I found this default configuration, bone-headed, at best. The panel on top only includes an ‘Applications’ and ‘Actions’ menu, then you get a huge unused space and then, at the right most side, you get the clock, and a menu which is equivelant to a chooser/finder as found on MacOS. It was a matter of time, before I deleted my bottom window list and embedded it on the main panel, to use all this unused space (note: I use a 1280×1024 resolution).
People will always argue that we are lucky that there is an option to do so, but the main point is, that the default configuration is what most people use. It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of users actually change (or have the right to change, in a business environment) their desktop and add/remove icons, themes or configurations. If the default configuration is not intuitive, most people will still live with it. Or they will switch to KDE. Or go back to Windows or MacOS. That’s the reality.
Among the obvious configuration options missing is a prefs panel to configure your screensavers, or a single place to get all your system panels. They are scattered either on subdirectories on Nautilus ‘Start Here’ page, or on ‘Applications’ sub-menus. Also, by having settings scattered to different panels it does not make it very clear where you could find some options. For example, you get two different panels ‘Desktop Theme’ and ‘Theme’ under the Desktop Preferences submenu, and then you get a ‘Desktop Theme Editor’ option on your System Tools. Now, which is which and what each one does? Good question.
I am sorry if I sounded harsh about the ‘bonehead’ word earlier, but this is 2x boneheaded. Every UI designer will laugh at this default setup of menus and even for the panels themselves, for not being able to configure themselves in one place in a clear manner, but having other theme panels for icons, other theme panels for GTK+ and other themes for the window manager etc. scattered throughout the memus, without giving a clear indication which one is which. And then, you get the Meta-Themes panel, which is supposedly here to fix this problem, by providing a service that can configure all these themes at once, but it loses itself among the other ‘theme’ panel offerings. The idea is good, but the way it is being presented, it is a UI disaster (same goes for KDE’s zillion theme panels as well, but at least they are under the same ‘umbrella’ in the Control Center).
The new Gnome 2 environment starts up much-much faster than Gnome 1.4 used to! It loads on my dual Celeron 533 in about 2-3 seconds, and this is indeed a major improvement. However, the speed ends there. Overall, Gnome 2 feels slower (and I compiled it with -03 and -march=i686 using gcc 3.1.1-CVS on my Mandrake Cooker). On Gnome 1.x if you needed some speed, you were just telling Nautilus to not draw the desktop and everything was fine. But if I turn off this option on the new Gnome, there are no icons drawing on the desktop anymore and I have no desktop context menu. I quite like the Nautilus drawing option, and I believe it was sensible for the Gnome project to pick Nautilus for the job, but some optimizations wouldn’t hurt.
And speaking about Nautilus, I am very pleased to see it coming of age. I can clearly see some BeOS-like elements into it, and of course this is of no surprise, as one of the Eazel developers that worked on it, was Pavel Cisler who also designed BeOS’ Tracker, and who today works at Apple on Finder.
My only problem with Nautilus was the inclusion of GTKhtml 2 as the main HTML renderer. GTKHtml is still extremely buggy. Its font sizes chosen are making the webpages unreadable, while it can’t browse links that have relative destination even if these links are on the same server (eg. comment.php instead of www.osnews.com/comment.php). While I understand that GTKHtml is far from done, the fact that is not done yet it should have been a good reason for not using it as the default HTML renderer on Nautilus. As far as I know, the guys over at CodeFactory haven’t touch its code almost for a year now (‘we are focusing on Mr. Project now‘ they told me back then) and the only real update that code have seen since then is its port to GTK+ 2.x.
Speaking about fonts, the new fonts coming with Gnome, like Nimbus, are great! Coupled with the AA engine, they give a really sexy look to the environment. Unfortunately, when launching Gnome for the first time, it picked as default an ugly sans serif font that it was also extremely small for the job (size 10). This is weird, because my Red Hat installation of Gnome 2-beta on my other machine, picked Nimbus correctly. Nimbus plus AA, looks like the default BeOS font. BeOS users will feel at home in this respect.
Gnome 2 comes with the Sawfish window manager as default. Everyone was raving about Metacity though, so I thought I should give it a go, and indeed I did so. Metacity seems a bit more lightweight than the feature-packed Sawfish. It does not have as many configuration options, but it works well and it plays well with the MetaThemes engine. For example, each time you change the GTK+ theme, the Metacity will pick it up and will adjust the color of the window manager. I am not sure if this is window manager’s job, but each time there is a new popup window, I would like it to get focus, but I found no such option anywhere to turn on. So, when I get IM’ed on the net, I do not even see the message windows, as they popup on the background. Pretty irritating to say the least. However, I like the simplicity of Metacity. Its themes are simple XML files and not always have accompanied images.
Gnome 2 does not come without its problems. I do not have sounds on my Gnome 2. I think that Gnome 2 assumes that you have Gnome 1.4 installed, and while I do have the libraries needed to run older GTK+ apps, I do not have the full installation, therefore, it can’t find the actual .wav files. The Sound panel argues that I should install the gnome-audio package, but a look at the 2.0 directory on many FTP servers, did not reveal such a package at all. On another note, Galeon stopped working from the moment I installed Gnome 2.0. And where are Pango’s multi-language settings to select another language for my keyboard? And where are the system tools for networking, or maybe a universal media player? Also, why the included system monitor can’t pick up both my CPUs? Oh, and I lost almost 2 paragraphs from this review, by typing it on the GTK+ 2.x updated Gedit text editor (which is also the default Gnome text editor). When I just place my cursor on the text, and then move my mouse away in order to type there, the program seems to think that I still have my button pressed and it keeps selecting my text. It happens so often that I was not always careful, and there go two full paragraphs. I changed my mouse settings from its Gnome panel, but it did not help the specific situation. Please note that the Kedit or Kwrite editors do not have the problem. Plus, scrolling this very document with Gedit is shamelessly slow when compared even to itself (or GXEdit) of the Gnome 1.x series.
These are small (or big, depending on the user) faults. As far as stability goes, I experienced on the final version individual crashes of some preference panels and applications that come with Gnome 2, but I have not experienced any true crash of its memu panels or Gnome itself that could take X down.
Gnome 2.0 is utilizing GConf, a Registry-like editor. Despite many of our readers getting shivers when hearing of the Windows Registry, I got to say I love GConf. It is a good idea and it is so easy to manipulate its values than the Registry itself. Partly this is because there are not many GTK+ 2.0 applications yet to populate its tree, but overall, you can find some cool options that you can’t find in the config panels. For example, if you want to be able to detach (tear-off) the menus of an application on Gnome 2, you need to hand-edit GConf.
The other important problem is the largely unfinished Help included. Only a handful of topics are discussed. A shame really. A commercial company would have never ship an OS or desktop environment with no real Help files. If this is how open source works, there would not be a chance that I would recommend any of this to my friends or family. Of course, such things prove right the people at MSNBC saying that Linux (and the rest X-based OSes) is not ready for the desktop. I am only here, to my dismay of course, to prove their conclusion right. (KDE has its own problems too, and I will come to that soon…)
The big question on any new release is ‘Whats New?’ or ‘What does it do more?’. In the case of Gnome 2, it does less, not more. GTK+ developers will of course be happy with the new API, and users will possibly enjoy the AA fonts, but other than that, users will not gain much more from this desktop environment. Hiding behind the ‘this is a mostly a release for developers’ excuse is not good enough for me. Gnome is around for years, and the GNU project was not able to deliver an outstanding version yet. Is this the best that the GNU project can offer to the Joe User who wants to switch away from the commercial option of OSX or Windows? Well, nice try.
I usually start my reviews with the positive points of a product and then continue with whatever I found as ‘bad’. In this case, I just can’t hide my dissapointment about the new version of Gnome. As a user, I expected more, and I want more. The new version removes the flexibility found on Gnome 1.x and it does not introduce anything really new or spectacularly interesting in its UI design. Gnome 2 fails to impress. It is not intuitive. It feels limited and not done yet. While it is not solidly stable yet on all of its respects, it is stable enough. But the ‘not done yet’ refers to the feature-set of the environment, not to its actual stability. It needs more work, it needs more enrichment at most places, and it needs even more refinement on the GUI and its scattered setting panels or on the small icons feeling ‘glued’ to the text on the menus. Because of this re-write of the Gnome environment, I keep feeling that this is version 1.0, and not 2.0. Except the name Gnome, not much are similar to Gnome 1.x, unless you are willing to re-configure all these panels away from their defaults. The non-similarity would possibly be a good thing (Gnome 1.x had UI flaws too), but in this case, it is not *yet*.
Overall: 6 / 10
By this point, I expected about a hundred Linux jockies on here personally attacking Eugenia for this
Anyway, sounds like Gnome 2 is a lot like Gnome 1 .. very amateurish and lacking the ‘polish’ of hte commercial OS’s, especially where the help files are concerned. At least the fonts are better and Nautilus seems workable but from reading the review, it’s nothing to write home about.
Tell it like it is girl!
About time someone who actually cares about UI gave an honest review of GNOME. After all these years, it’s still bloated, buggy, full of nasty dependencies and ugly(though it’s improved somewhat on those last two). I use *NIX as my daily desktop OS, but it’s for the power, not the GUI. I would never recommend it for a desktop machine to anyone other than advanced users, who are already doing it anyhow…
Until someone comes up with a small, integrated and well thought out GUI environment for *NIX(and no, I don’t consider Aqua all of those things), I’ll just have to stick with blackbox, as it pisses me off the least.
Yes, it’s called rox-filer. It is intuitive, fast as hell, and
does everything I need it to do. With Metacity as the
window manager and a few choice gnome apps, it
makes my FreeBSD box into something my mom could
use. Plus Appdirs make life soooo much easer.
Rob
It is my opinion that with the release of KDE3 and all the hooplah, gnome developers were more rushed than ever to get this thing out the door and satisfy all those “is it ready yet, ok now is it…..ok must be ready now” people. I think with the next release things will get better, lets not forget what the first official release of KDE3 was like. *buggy*
I guess I may be doing something different than you but my experiences have been fantastic. The improved UI is cleaner. The text looks great. A major theme of this release was to remove bloat, clutter, and unecessary options. Gnome 2 is far more elegant than previous versions of gnome. It’s much faster on my pentium 500 than gnome 1.4. There is much improved user application consistancy. I have been running snapshots for several weeks. I have not had so much as one panel crash, and Eugenia claims to have done it several times? Is it possible this was a bad install? I’m not claiming that this release is perfect but I will say its my preferred desktop, anf that I have had wonderful experiences with stability and performance. It might also be worth noting that there are several applications not included with the main release. They just arent production quality yet, I suggest waiting for gnome 2.2 If you want all the infrastructure changes and the user visibile changes planned. The only issue I have with Gnome 2 as a whole is the removal of the menu editing, but I respect the descisions behind it. It was not ready and not of the quality the gnome2 release team was willing to endorse. But it will be. Keep in mind no product will get better without reproducing bugs, and reporting them. If you want something changed or fixed, download gnome2, test it, join the chat on irc and help make the software better. Get your feedback into the community of developers so they can make even better successive releases.
> I have not had so much as one panel crash, and Eugenia claims to have done it several times?
*Preference panels*, not Gnome/menu panels. I experienced 4 pref. panel crashes so far, since yesterday.
Of course I expected something like this, but some paragraphs just made me angry. I will _not_ waste my time and pick on every single misinformed statement in this article but try to keep it constructive… *counts slowly up to ten*
“smooth resizing (with medium success, I might add – when compared to MacOSX and BeOS 6-Dano’s algorithms/techniques),”
Just as a sidenote, this is probably an issue of X, not Gtk. I just tried Gtk2.0 on DirectFB and that just flies. Too bad there is no real windowmanagment using Gtk on DFB yet, I would love that.
“For example, the memu panel, merely includes 3 options. Same goes for the other setting panels (when available), they lack the flexibility and number of options found in the previous version of Gnome.”
You got this wrong. The main philosophy of Gnome 2 is, that less is sometimes more. The idea is to create an enjoyable user experience by default instead of letting him choose between “six equally broken ways to do it” (great quote from Havoc Pennington). That’s why there are much less preferences, not because there is anything yet to be ported (preferences would be the first thing to be ported over).
Later you state that exactly this would be a good thing.
“I found this default configuration, bone-headed, at best. The panel on top only includes an ‘Applications’ and ‘Actions’ menu, then you get a huge unused space and then, at the right most side, you get the clock, and a menu which is equivelant to a chooser/finder as found on MacOS. It was a matter of time, before I deleted my bottom window list and embedded it on the main panel”
Why is this “bone-headed”? I’m sure everyone at Gnome would be happy for some reasonable arguments, so it can be changed to the better. The default makes perfect sense to me. The menu at the top left (where else), clock on the topright. In between there is enough place for your launchers and applets (not “wasted” space like you put it) and at the bottom there is the taskbar. I don’t see the merits of having a taskbar “integrated” into another bar, why should this be more intuitive? Or is your argument that two panels are waisting screen estate? Some clarification would be nice.
“People will always argue that we are lucky that there is an option to do so, but the main point is, that the default configuration is what most people use. It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of users actually change (or have the right to change, in a business environment) their desktop and add/remove icons, themes or configurations. If the default configuration is not intuitive, most people will still live with it.”
You just discovered the one big idea behind Gnome 2. If you think a default isn’t right, provide some logical arguments please. I suggest to read the Metacity README file, it’s very interesting and the same philosophy basically applies for the whole GNOME project. http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/metacity/README
“My only problem with Nautilus was the inclusion of GTKhtml 2 as the main HTML renderer. GTKHtml is still extremely buggy. Its font sizes chosen are making the webpages unreadable, while it can’t browse links that have relative destination even if these links are on the same server (eg. comment.php instead of http://www.osnews.com/comment.php).”
That is because Nautilus is _no_ webbrowser. It’s a filebrowser (just because Windows and KDE have a combined File/Webbrowser doesn’t mean Gnome has to as well). And there _is_ a difference between viewing a HTML page and browsing the web. GtkHTML is fine for the beginning to view HTML pages. Later there will be a Galeon component integrated into Nautilus.
“The other important problem is the largely unfinished Help included. Only a handful of topics are discussed. A shame really. A commercial company would have never ship an OS or desktop environment with no real Help files.”
And neither will Ximian.
“If this is how open source works, there would not be a chance that I would recommend any of this to my friends or family. Of course, such things prove right the people at MSNBC saying that Linux (and the rest X-based OSes) is not ready for the desktop. I am only here, to my dismay of course, to prove their conclusion right.”
This is the part that made me angry. Just as with proprietory software, there is “free” (as in no cost) Free Software and commercial Free Software. When comparing commercial proprietory software to Free Software, you have to compare it to commercial Free Software of course! So you should rather look at Ximian, they are doing a fine job. So far they are mostly targeted at buisiness consumers though, because it’s not really appropriate for home desktop users anyway. But it will one day and when it is, there will be a company making it “complete”. To draw the conclusion from a free Gnome 2 release targeted mostly at developers to “Free Software isn’t able to deliver commercial quality releases” is just plain unfair. Even comparing Free Software to commercial software is showing a complete lack of understanding because Free Software _is_ by definition commercial software because anyone is allowed to make money from it. But not everyone does. And you can’t expect anything from those who don’t!
I completely agree with you that Gnome 2 lacks a lot in features, etc and I guess that most Gnome developer will also agree with you. Gnome is really a new base, removing a lot of old crap and trying to make things “right”. It will grow from now.
It’s your best right to say that you don’t want to use something that is still lacking as much as Gnome 2 does and that you wouldn’t recommend it to Joy User but I’m really getting angry when I see this mindless bashing of their efforts.
> By this point, I expected
> about a hundred Linux jockies
> on here personally attacking
> Eugenia for this
The linux jockies didn’t show up, so the anti-linux jockies who are never happy unless they are whining about linux folks jumps in. Just as usual:)
Anyway, good review. Maybe Ximain will eventually make something good out of gnome.
> mindless bashing of their efforts.
This is a review of their Gnome 2.0. If I find something nice, I write it. If I find something wrong, I write it too. I am not over here to babysit their FUTURE plans and how the “new, clean codebase of Gnome 2” will behave in 2 years from now.
I wrote what I experienced. If I start talking about how I would like it to be and how I am sure that the devs will put these features in 1-2 years from now, I lose the point of writing this review, today. Come to my position for a 1 minute and you will see my standpoint. I am not reviewing their future version. I am reviewing version 2.0.
Gnome has always been clunky. they need to stop doing the half mac, half Windows crap. the top tool bar in mac is there because that is where all the window menues are, however gnome insists on using the windows for the menues just like Windows.
and (this is more KDE and Gnome) I hate the pannel that they have. I like a CDE/Next/Xfce/OSX pannel that is centered.
KDE is definatly the closest to being perfect….if we are talking about DE.
That was not my point. You are free to write about anything bad you find (although I think some of them were unfair or at least questionable, like bashing of the default panel setup). What made me angry was simply your claim that lack of help files would show a the inability of Free Software to keep up with “commercial” standards. Just because there is also commercial Free Software and that’s what you would have to compare. The “uncommercial” Free Software is usually not suited for non-geek endusers.
Just look at Mozilla/Netscape. Geeks and experienced users usually take Mozilla because they know how to use it, but endusers should get Netscape Communicator. Same quality but ready for the enduser. With documentation, support and everything. Still Free Software, but commercial.
gnome 2 may have been cleaned up API-wise, and not enough time has yet gone into the optimisation side of things. we’ll have to wait on this one to see if they do now turn their hands to stability and speed rather than adding more features…
i think its very strange that gnome (which is in C) is mostly slower than kde, even though kde takes a big hit in performance from being written in C++. someone commented that this is much less with gcc 3.1, and i do hope so. but why is gnome so slow?
i think at least some (maybe only a little, but) of the instability that eugenia suffered was due to the rather advanced features she used (-O3 -march=i686, gcc 3.1.1) with more conservative settings (-O, gcc 2.96) it might be more stable. but then youre trading speed for stability.
it would be nice to see gnome (and kde, too) move to a much more interesting UI paradigm, but it isnt going to happen. both projects have been chasing MS/apple in the WIMP paradigm and they probably dont feel they can risk putting potential users off with something radical.
all i can say is: “i’m waiting for gnome 2.1 before i put it on here”
“and (this is more KDE and Gnome) I hate the pannel that they have. I like a CDE/Next/Xfce/OSX pannel that is centered.”
That is your personaly opinion. I don’t see why having the panel centered would be the most efficient or intuitive. But as a matter of fact, it’s extremely simple to create a panel like that with the Gnome panel. Ximian Gnome even has a default option for this.
> the instability that eugenia suffered was due to the rather advanced features she used (-O3 -march=i686, gcc 3.1.1) with more conservative settings (-O, gcc 2.96) it might be more stable.
Not really. Gnome 2 compiles and has been tested on GCC 3.x. As for the optimizations, they are there so we can use them… Even Mandrake and Gentoo enables them on most of their builds.
As I said in the article, I did not have major instability issues with Gnome. Gnome itself is pretty stable. But the pref panels have not been thoroughly tested. These are the ones that are easier to break.
Well, there are just too many packages for gnome 2.x and I am kind of confused which packages I need to download to install complete Gnome 2.x desktop. I am currently using RedHat 7.3.
If there is anything who use the same distribution, please enlighten me.
Thank you
No, you need to download them almost all. And in fact, you need to install them in a special order! Sounds too much, hey? (yup, another problem of the Unix packaging system in general – they come in zillion pieces, even if you need all of them, or some of them, instead of a nice executable file that will take care everything for you
Use Garnome or CVSGnome, which are scripts that will download and compile Gnome 2 for you. You will need to edit CVSGnome’s scripts a bit, in order to change their default settings.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1275
“(yup, another problem of the Unix packaging system in general – they come in zillion pieces, even if you need all of them, or some of them, instead of a nice executable file that will take care everything for you
”
How can you put several libraries and applications in one executable?
You usually don’t face the hassle of installing parts of the desktop itself on other systems though because they come preinstalled. I’m sure installing the Mac OS X Desktop on Windows 2000 would be almost as difficult.
“(yup, another problem of the Unix packaging system in general – they come in zillion pieces, even if you need all of them, or some of them, instead of a nice executable file that will take care everything for you
”
—-
uhm, i just have to comment this. If this is how you want things to be, then by all ways, go back to windows. Also, if you want .exe’s that do most things for you, i dont know why in gods name you are doing reviews *nix software – as it probably leads to biased reviews.
besides, ever heard about apt/dpkg, ports and portage ? yes, rpm sucks. RPM = Retarded Package Managment (TM) – but there are other way better alternatives.
> If this is how you want things to be, then by all ways, go back to windows
It was the fellow up there that has the problem, not me. But yes, I would welcome an easier installer for such big applications. Painless installation procedures are welcome, no matter how “lame” they may sound to unix gurus like yourself.
Personally, I mostly use Gentoo Linux, which comes with the Portage system. Unfortunately, Joe Users can’t really use or even install Gentoo.
Anyways, we are far away from our subject.
hmm bidz I want something better than WIndows…not 2 steps backwards
I found you review to be a fair representation of what you saw with Gnome 2. I don’t think anyone can ask anything more from a review.
I agree with most everything you said but I have to say that you might be judging it a little harshly. This release of gnome is like OS X gotten directly from the programmers before it hits the polishers and buffers. I think this type of user experance review should be best left for when Ximian get their hands on Gnome 2.
i’m not saying that easier install methods are “lame”
people choose what they want to use and prefer – its as easy as that – but choosing to use a OS based on the UNIX platform includes much more advanced functions/features/methods/whatever than Windows. Complaining about this, is in my opinion, not right – if a person wants things the easy way, use the easy way, use Windows. I just prefer UNIX’s way, cause thats what im most comfortable/happy with.
And regarding Gentoo (using it myself), yes – its *much* harder than installing Windows. But, know this, instead of installing Mandrake (from which you dont learn _anything_ valuable) – i advise newbies to start on the more difficult distro’s instead (gentoo, slackware, debian) – yes, its much more annoying/irritating to start with, but once you get your system configured properly, you have learned _alot_ of _valuable_ stuff that is very good to know if you are gonna use Linux as your mainstream operating system.
Way off-topic, i agree, but i just had to reply
For the maze that is a Unix system, I would say APT does the best job of managing it. Too bad you don’t have Debian on your disk. =) It does not just install all the fitting (and usually stable) packages for you but also does all the configuration for you. Debian was the first system I managed to actually get KDE 2 installed on when I was new to GNU/Linux (after failing with SuSE and destroying my system with Mandrake). APT may be overhead for installing simple applications and such but for installing or upgrading large parts of the system itself (like the desktop), it’s pure gold (as long as it doesn’t break that is…).
Well, it sounds like Gnome 2.0 is such a departure in both it’s vision and approach that it should almost be called “Something Else 1.0”. And I don’t mean that sarcastically – I just mean that they have developed this with a different vision and starting point. So, I guess it’s a matter of expectations. I think, because of my expectations, I would have the same reaction Eugenia did, based on 2.0 as it is right now. I had the expectation that it would be more polished, more refined, more intunitive, etc. But, it sounds like they came up with new ideas for Gnome and have put it up and are sort of silently saying, “Well, here’s what we came up with – now we all have to *really* work on it”. And, as it turns out, this is not meant for Joe User as is, that’s okay. It sounds like the ideas they came up with and are trying to start implementing are good ones, but still somewhat undeveloped. We all have our particulat interests regarding Linux and other OS’s. My own particular interest is that of Linux for Joe User – that’s what I’m always looking at. So, I’m disappointed because I thought 2.0 would be a big step in that direction. But, I see it’s not that – at least not right now – so I’ll move on from my disappointment and hope for good things as it’s worked on. But, there is the matter of time. When I see Microsoft spreading out in all kinds of directions with different versions of XP, when I see all the resources that have been and are being poured into OS X, I wonder if Linux for Joe User – my particular interest – will ever have a chance. I’ve heard many Linux lover say that we should forget about Linux on the desktop and just concentrate on servers only. But, when I use something like, for example, Suse 8.0 and I experienced how easy it is to install and how well it basically works, I then again say to myself, “This could work, not quite there yet for Joe User, but not far away, not far at all”. I just don’t know how much time there is left for that. I haven’t given up though.
true, but gentoo (portage) has a similar system, that works just as well. so does freebsd (ports), and openbsd, and sorcerer. so debian/apt isnt the only variant/choice
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/portage-manual.html – to read about Portage (gentoo’s package system).
for instnance, from a totally basic system without mostly nothing installed;
emerge kde <enter> (as root ofcourse)
would download kde, xfree86 + all needed dependencies, automatically – also the newest versions, compile all the files in the correct order, with the optimization flags you selected as your global make choice, install it all in proper directories, setup every configuration bit automaticly, and when its done, its added to your world update file, which looks for updates on this release later. so lets say a new kde version comes out, you do: emerge -u kde – fixes everything. – everything works.
I know, I had FreeBSD installed for a while and currently Gentoo is on one of my partitions.
I didn’t try to emerge Gnome yet though, because it takes so freaking long… The first thing I did was “emerge vim”, then I was shocked because it started to compile XFree. 
Maybe I’ll play a bit more with it (currently I only use my Gentoo system to try new framebuffer stuff like Cosmoe or DirectFB). I don’t yet feel comfortable with the idea of loosing so much time to compiling software… Hm. I don’t even want to imagine how long a world upgrade would take. 
Good review Eugenia, but perhaps Gnome 2.0 was never intended for the users. This was noted on Slashdot and I sort of agree with it. Gnome 2.0 was intended for developers to port their software to the new API. That could explain the unfinished configurations and help files. Perhaps we will see the next version of Mandrake or RedHat with Gnome 2.1 or above (or Gnome 2.0 configured nicely). Until then, if users are using your desktop to be productive, then they should stick with Gnome 1.4 or even KDE3.
I am an all time Linux user and to me the usability of my desktop is far more important than good looks and eye candy features (as long as it’s not too ugly). Did I upgrade to Gnome 2.0 when it came out? No. Do I feel I need to upgrade? Well, the peer pressure is sometimes hard to ignore. (all the geeks are doing it…:)
Eugenia, I am a UI designer. And you’re right, I’ve been laughing at GNOME for the past two years. (I’ve also been laughing at KDE, but for different design snafus). Well, it’s not actually laughing, it’s more “how the @#$# could they still being doing that stupid design after all this time? Don’t they know that it will completely blow any kind of mental model the user is trying to form?” When you see interface designs this bad going unfixed after 2 or more years (or ‘fixed’ and made just as bad or worse), why all of a sudden do we think that things will suddently change with the next release of the software?
Anyhow, here’s a few good articles that attempt to describe what’s going on with free software and UI problems:
http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/04/13
http://mpt.phrasewise.com/2002/04/21
🙂 Hey Eugenia, are you in the warez-business lately or was this Dano-thinggy only hear-say..? I remember that you were strongly against any refference towards this copy some month back, so I guess your ethics forbid you hold a copy yourself..?!
I have seen Dano long before it got leaked last October, even if I had never talked about it to anyone before. I first saw it in August 2000, at Be’s offices. And before that, I had seen an early, leaked screenshot on Geocities, dating back to 1999.
I am strictly against linking to an .iso image, not against talking about it. I am not going to hide behind my own shadow (as we say in Greece) and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Today, it doesn’t seem that there is a single BeOS user without a copy of the leaked iso.
We already had a handful of Dano articles on OSNews, make a search on the left.
Could you please elaborate, where exactly the Gnome 2 UI still sucks? I think that the Gnome project is currently _very_ open to interface suggestions and does a good job at maintaining consitency. So maybe if you could give some hints, they could work on it.
Besides, I’m really not sure about this “free software UI’s tend to suck” theory… For example when I look at Galeon, the interface is at least ten times more intuitive than the one of internet explorer (especially menus and preferences). How many UI designers work for Microsoft? There are good and bad examples, both in proprietory and free software world. I just think that the designers of the Gnome 1 and KDE 2 UI’s were on crack or something. It doesn’t have to be that bad.
Interface design is no rocket sience, you just need a lot of taste and common sense…
I am quite agree with some comment that says Gnome 2 is good and decent enough BUT for those who came from Unix world that full with CLI. Actually my early days was in Window$ world but it have been quite long I’ve been maintaining QNX (and sometime also playing with SCO Unix and Irix server which I got a limited access) at my office and my personal Linux at office and home. My comment is that so far Unix world is far behind Windows, OSX or BeOS in term of joe user usability.
The easiness and usability of Window$ until now cannot be challenged by Gnome and even by KDE. However I like the alternative OS so much and this 2 is the best choice available currently.
For those who complaining about difficulty to compile Gnome compared to installing Window$, please be fair. In Window$, you will never do what you do while compiling Gnome or KDE. If you want some comparison, at least compare Window$ installation with Linux Distribution installation, which in my opinion the SuSE and Caldera installation is the easier compared to others (even to Mandrake).
It is my opinion that with the release of KDE3 and all the hooplah, gnome developers were more rushed than ever to get this thing out the door and satisfy all those “is it ready yet, ok now is it…..ok must be ready now” people. I think with the next release things will get better, lets not forget what the first official release of KDE3 was like. *buggy*
Actually, KDE 3.0 wasn’t buggy. I never actually found a bug, all the bugs I have found in the RCs were fixed! Hallelujah!.
But if you say KDE 2.0 was buggy when it was released, I would agree 100% with you. Just like GNOME 2.0, KDE 2.0 was more of a rewrite than a port.
Say…. did anyone remember how buggy GNOME 1.0 was? It was barely usable..
all i can say is: “i’m waiting for gnome 2.1 before i put it on here”
2.1 would be the development version, while 2.2 would be the final stable version of 2.1. Linux versioning style..
That is your personaly opinion. I don’t see why having the panel centered would be the most efficient or intuitive. But as a matter of fact, it’s extremely simple to create a panel like that with the Gnome panel. Ximian Gnome even has a default option for this.
It is also possible on KDE Kicker. But if you had use the OS/ WMs she had mentioned, both GNOME (2.0, never tried 1.x which was suppose to be better in this regard) and KDE only follows the idea as in looks, but not in function. But at least now we know for sure why she loves Window Maker
Well, there are just too many packages for gnome 2.x and I am kind of confused which packages I need to download to install complete Gnome 2.x desktop. I am currently using RedHat 7.3.
If there is anything who use the same distribution, please enlighten me.
Try Ximian’s Red Carpet snapshots. If you don’t want Red Carpet, install all the packages 🙂 You couldn’t go wrong… it worked for me 🙂 LOL.
You usually don’t face the hassle of installing parts of the desktop itself on other systems though because they come preinstalled. I’m sure installing the Mac OS X Desktop on Windows 2000 would be almost as difficult.
Nah… for Windows, click on the *.exe and click next when asked. For Mac OS X, move it to the applications folder and open it…. (Oh wait, this stuff only works if Explorer and Aqua is installed!)
uhm, i just have to comment this. If this is how you want things to be, then by all ways, go back to windows. Also, if you want .exe’s that do most things for you, i dont know why in gods name you are doing reviews *nix software – as it probably leads to biased reviews.
This kind of attitude is really keeping Linux from the desktop, and Linux zealots cry out “Why! Why oh God! Why do we have only 3.8% of the users! Oh wait, it must be Microsoft fault…”.
Anyway, if you haven’t notice, she was responding to a newbie. She is a user of Gentoo Linux and Mandrake Linux, as well as OS X and Be OS, IIRC.
besides, ever heard about apt/dpkg, ports and portage ? yes, rpm sucks. RPM = Retarded Package Managment (TM) – but there are other way better alternatives.
I would love to hear why RPM sucks, because up to now, I haven’t use a Linux distro without RPM. In a few months I’m moving to Gentoo. But I haven’t had problems with RPM, the only problem is that I want some management for the software I compile, so it is easier to uninstall and install them (my Mandrake system with a lot of optimized apps is a clutter).
So really, i would like to hear why dpkg is better than RPM.
I agree with most everything you said but I have to say that you might be judging it a little harshly. This release of gnome is like OS X gotten directly from the programmers before it hits the polishers and buffers. I think this type of user experance review should be best left for when Ximian get their hands on Gnome 2.
Yeah, but if OS X 10.0 was much better than it was when it was release, there is a high chance that I might I have been using a Mac. Why? Because of hype. But the hype gave empty promises.
Debian was the first system I managed to actually get KDE 2 installed on when I was new to GNU/Linux (after failing with SuSE and destroying my system with Mandrake)
But IIRC, it still doesn’t have any stable packages for KDE 3.0 in Debian…
I read your articles linked to about open source interfaces; for those not reading the articles they claimed that the problem is basically that open source projects are run by amateurs, who lack expertise in ui design and project management.
First, I don’t agree that closed source or commercial interfaces are so great – and secodly both Gnome and Kde are commercial projects (using some volunteer coders but mostly run by commercial sponsors). Don’t let anyone tell you that the developers are not heavily influened by commercial sponsors or in some cases given marching orders by sponsors which employ them.
Gnome and Kde have different kinds of interface issues – but I’d say either is preferable to the Windows interface. Gnome’s problem is mostly bugs and a toolkit (gtk) that doesn’t make it easy to establish consistency among apps with the code or even to extend (subclass) standard widgets. This is much easier with Kde’s classes based on Qt for all application programmers to use. On the other hand Kde’s problem is trying to be a total desktop and applying too much uniformity, and trying to do everything on the desktop.
For example, the bloated control center. It’s too much in your face.
You get a lot more with either Gnome or Kde than with Windows, though, and the defaults are not so hard to change.
Home users spend a lot of time tweaking desktops because they like to do that, and in a corporate setting this is done by the IT staff so defaults are not an issue, really. With Windows very little can be customized and your’re limited to one desktop. There are many, many interface inconsistencies with Windows also. The thing is people are used to it.
I don’t use either Gnome or Kde anymore, because of the resource requirements, a polite term for bloat. But almost any Window manager gives you what you need to start apps with menus and/or icons or panels and navigate among desktops and workspaces, and to customize with themes.
I wish people would look at both Gnome and Kde as application frameworks rather than as desktops, because desktops as commonly understood are not what make a good gui environment. More than anything it’s the toolkits programmers have to work with and guidelines to provide some consistency among apps, but too much consistency isn’t always desirable, depending on the app.
Gnome is cursed with the Gtk toolkit, which just doesn’t cut it. I’ve given it a try, and I have experimented some with Gtk 2. Too many depenencies, too little provided in the way of standard widgets or objects (like a decent file open dialog which is still 10 years behind Qt’s), etc., plague this toolkit. Not to mention the dozens of dependencies added to Gtk by Gnome. Qt is an excellent toolkit. So is Fltk although it’s not as mature or polished as Qt.
Again, on what is a good desktop. I worked a lot with Os2 years ago programming gui apps and writing specs for projects, for which I also had to do coding. Os2’s desktop was good, but not great. To get the same functionality wiht Os2 you can get with Kde or Gnome you had to add third party helpers, some of them written by IBM employees in their spare time. For example, multiple desktop pagers and extensions to the desktop menu. Of course OS2 didn’t have the bugs Kde and Gnome have and had a very consistent look and feel because every app used the same toolkit. You had no choice.
Desktops are not the issue in getting people to use Linux. Apps might be an issue. Many types of apps are not available or have very limited availabity. On the other hand you get a whole lot of good, free applications with any Linux distribution. What do you get with Windows? MS Paintbrush or whatever their bmp editor is called, notepad, and a solitaire game! How can one compare that to Gimp and Open Office?
There are always people claiming to be ui experts. I think they’re full of it, trying to sell their services which nobody really needs. Feedback from users and even focus groups, and having a few people on the project with backgrounds in fine art or commercial art is more valuable. An artist has to actually execute a design whereas a ui expert merely writes papers and critiques of the designs of others. Which do you think is more useful?
“Nah… for Windows, click on the *.exe and click next when asked. For Mac OS X, move it to the applications folder and open it….”
You think this would work for installing a completely new desktop? Most of those OS _is_ the desktop, so you would basically be replacing the whole system besides the kernel. I doubt that this is possible by clicking on the .exe and next but who knows.
“I would love to hear why RPM sucks”
No you don’t.
Just try it out for yourself. Or if you aren’t interested in binary packages anymore, it doesn’t matter anyway. If someone has trouble installing Gnome from RPM’s, you already have one reason why they suck. Maybe it has become better, I don’t know… But when I tried it back in the days of KDE 2, it was a complete mess. The beauty of dpkg and Debian is, that everything fits together perfectly, more than 2000 contributors are working on great packages for _one_ defined base system after strict policies. The not so beauty and downright painfull side of dpkg though is, that you are out on your own if something breaks. You could wait for the really stable packages, but then you will wait forever (you know the saying “only hell freezes slower than Debian” or something like that). If you are somewhat experienced with GNU/Linux and Debian, you will be able to workaround any possible problems though even when only using packages from unstable (which are stable in 98 of 100 cases).
“But IIRC, it still doesn’t have any stable packages for KDE 3.0 in Debian…”
Nah, I installed KDE 3 a few days before, they works… They are just not as cool as the KDE 2 packages were. Yet. The KDE 2 packager did a great job. :/ The current packages are a bit tricky to install (apt-get install kde3 won’t do anything) and not split up, so you don’t have single packages for Konqueror, Kate, etc.
@Spark
Ok, you asked about UI, so here’s my opinion
I think that keeping the taskbar and “Start button” equivalents on the bottom of the screen and application menus at the top (when application window is maximised) isn’t a good idea, because that requires you to do more work with the mouse (going back and forth to the top and bottom of the screen) instead of concentrating on your work. Therefore I like MacOS way of doing this more.
sorry for my poor english
There is no start button anymore. They seem to have dropped the idea of the “footmenu” which is a good idea IMO.
The only thing on the bottom is the taskbar and the pager.
Do you mean it’s a hassle to move between the taskbar (bottom) and the menubar (top) all the time? How does MacOS do this? Do they also have the taskbar/pager at the top?
> There is no start button anymore. They seem to have dropped the idea of the “footmenu” which is a good idea IMO.
I like that, too.
> Do you mean it’s a hassle to move between the taskbar (bottom) and the menubar (top) all the time?
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.
> How does MacOS do this? Do they also have the taskbar/pager at the top?
I’ve only used classic MacOSs so I cannot comment on MacOS X version (it seems there’s some changes in the UI).
So, I think there’s no pager in classic MacOSs (although there may be some third party additions that have this functionality. What about taskbar: there is similar functionality. Near the right corner of the bar at the top of the screen there’s an icon of application you are running. If you click it, the drop down menu appears showing applications running at the time. When you click on one of them the application comes to the front of the screen and bar at the top of the screen becomes the menu for that application.
I’m sure you already knew this, I just wanted to show what I think are good points of the Mac GUI. It sure would be nice to have them in Linux GUIs and like Eugenia has written in the article similar functionality is available in GNOME. But it would be even better if there was possibility to have application menus on the bar on the top of the screen.
ok that’s the largest quantity of english i can write in a day, so i’m going to rest for a while 🙂
You are right that many commercial projects don’t have good interfaces – most copy existing ones, follow guidelines (even though MS break theirs – eg http://www.iarchitect.com/find95.htm or http://www.iarchitect.com/file95.htm for those who insist that the Gnome file dialog is bad and the Windows is good), or let graphics artists have total control (http://www.iarchitect.com/phone.htm or http://www.iarchitect.com/readplease.htm). Very little genuinely good UI research is done by even the largest companies (Apple probably being the best exception). The above examples are MS, IBM and yes, even Apple (http://www.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm).
With all these mistakes, it is no wonder that OSS is thought of as having bad UI design, but this can be approached in 2 ways: 1) The design is not intuitive, and 2) the design is not consistent between OS’s.
An intuitive design is a design that someone could figure out without referring to help or experience with other OS’s. Apple excelled at this because the early versions of MacIntosh were designed for this market – people who weren’t programmers or regular computer professionals. Sadly, IMHO pretty much every modern OS is not intuitive (even BeOS which had me confused for a long time, and OSX which is a departure from the simple elegance of the early Macs). Computers these days are complex things, far more than when the first Apple OS’s appeared – few people had to configure networking then, whereas now, it is normal, and this increase in complexity necessitates a degree of prior knowledge.
As for the inconsistency, OSS is never going to win. Apple designs are
different from Windows, and any leaning one way or the other is going to draw
criticism (witness the recent complaints about Lycoris looking and acting too
much like Windows).
The only true test of how intuitive an interface is is to take groups of
people unfamiliar with any OS, and see how well they can perform a standard
set of tasks. Compare the results between OS’s, and voila, some objectivity
will be established. Sadly, in my own research into UI design (I am doing a
phd on it), I have not found any research. Maybe I can feel a research grant
proposal coming on?
From personal experience, I got used to the Linux DE’s much better than I did
with Windows, but was this due to the prior experience I had or because they
were more intuitive? There is no objective answer.
As mentioned earlier, reliance on artists for an effective design can be
troublesome – an interface may look wonderful, but could operate like a pig
and inhibit productivity, but then some people prefer eye candy over getting
things done. A good UI expert will simply give objective feedback to the
designers after measuring the design using a rigourous methodology.
Finally, there are a lot of armchair “ui” experts, sadly with little research
backing up their opinions, but I would have to point out that focus groups are
not the best way to measure designs – many product failures have resulted from
reliance on this methodology. A better way to measure a design is to observe
how people interact with it in practice.
Hmm I think I see your points but after thinking about them for a while, they do not sound really usefull. Maybe I overlooked something… This is how I see it:
– Putting the taskbar on top will only help to reduce mouse travel, if users would be working with the application menu most of the time. I think though, that this should be rare cases and applications should mostly be usefull without the menu. So the user usually is working at the center of the screen, tending to the bottom (for example, I’m currently writing this in the bottom third of my screen), so the taskbar at the bottom is actually much nearer than at the top.
– A windowlist isn’t the most fast way to switch windows, right? First you have to click this button/item, then you have to look for your window of choice and click again. With a taskbar you can look immidiatly for your window of choice and then click it. Unless the MacOS windowlist was some very special one, I wouldn’t want this (Gnome already had several of those windowlist applets).
– Menus at the top… I don’t agree with this completely. I don’t know it from a Mac but from KDE… I liked the idea somehow because it safed me window space but the point is, that I constantly had to move my mouse from my application to the menubar. You suggest that people run their applications in fullscreen but IMO, this isn’t the best way to use a window manager. Otherwise we wouldn’t need windows in the first place, would we?
So with larger screens becoming more popular, I think window managers should be designed to actually work with windows. Having the menubar on top, seperated from the application will cause a lot of useless mouse movement, don’t you think?
I also got quite a bit confused when I had several windows on the screen and had to figure out which one was currently showing the menubar.
Unfortunately, Joe Users can’t really use or even install Gentoo.
Unfortunately Linux/Unix isn’t made for Joe User. If joe wants linux he probably goes with something like Mandrake and they use to configure the distributed desktops after their own taste.
…another problem of the Unix packaging system in general – they come in zillion pieces, even if you need all of them, or some of them, instead of a nice executable file that will take care everything for you.
It’s not a “problem” of the packaging system, it’s the packages themselves that are made in a certain way. Ie I personally favour the debian way of packaging thins like kdebase, kate, konqueror etc separately in order to give the user more power to pick his components. If a debian user wants it all after all he can just type “apt-get install kde” anyway, or in mandrake this could probably be acvhieved by “urpmi kde”, or just picking kde in the graphical RPMDrake. Of course you can still use the windows approach and distribute a huge executable like StarOffice does – but it doesn’t integrate very well with the package systems (that are preferable to the application chaos found on platforms like Windows and MacOS).
On another note I agree with you that Gnome is lacking much as a complete desktop. Personally I think Gnome should ditch the desktop idea and focus on building handy and flexible applications, panels and frameworks to use in conjunction with WM of choice. That’s what Gnome always has been best at anyway. KDE is already there for users wanting to have a complete desktop environment.
I’ve only found something related to this at scopeware.com, but frankly not what I was looking for (an IExplorer/database enterprise server solution, and $400 the license).
But that is more or less the concept, I want to be from start in control of a large database at home (70G of hard disk already is), and have it completely integrated with the Internet. We need a browser style UI design with more file managing, searching and networking capabilities, not the MY_HOME icon. This not new, it is old news, old needs, but nothing like it has come out yet for home/small business producing.
If I were an UI designer the first thing I would do nowadays is killing about all icons, I hate them. Power to the alphabet (those are enough icons for me).
As said, I’ve been searching for a different UI focus and all I find are very few unfinished/amateur XML projects. Anyone here knows of something more ambitious?
Another slightly differet approach seems to be that of Oeone.com (they are looking for an UI designer right now), I haven’t tried it.
As to Gnome2, I find it far more pretty looking than KDE3, looks matter when you spend most of the day in front of a screen, but Gnome2 is also far more unusable for me (again, for me). Anyway, I don’t use KDE3 productively either, I use MS Windows2000, and I hate this, not because of MS, but because of the powerful command line Linux has which I’d like to have near a powerful and usable GUI (keeping performance and a bit of my wallet: no Apple).
Installation and building from source needs to be simplified.
I would like to see a version of Gnome 2 available as a single (large!) source tarball, which would include everything needed to build Gnome on a clean Unix system that has a working X.
Then the user could extract the tarball, edit the makefile to keep undesired items from being built and to set the target installation directory, and then do a single “make build” or “make install”.
With Windows very little can be customized and your’re limited to one desktop
Not true, John. There are a lot of alternative shell / desktop replacements out there for Windows. Two of them, Litestep and Blackbox, are ports of *nix window managers.
Personally, I loathe the Gnome interface. When I boot over to Linux, I’m using KDE, which isn’t much prettier.
Desktops are not the issue in getting people to use Linux. Apps might be an issue. Many types of apps are not available or have very limited availabity. On the other hand you get a whole lot of good, free applications with any Linux distribution. What do you get with Windows? MS Paintbrush or whatever their bmp editor is called, notepad, and a solitaire game! How can one compare that to Gimp and Open Office?
Last time I checked, OpenOffice and Gimp were ported to Win32. There are also a ton of sites out there with free Windows software. Granted, you need to go download these to get them, but I’d rather have a clean OS install and not have to uncheck a bunch of packages I don’t really need. That’s my biggest hangup with Linux in general. I won’t go into the other hangups I have, since that would be a long post.
I usually set my desktop up to use a lightweight window manager, and ditch KDE and Gnome altogether.
“My way or the highway” is not welcome around these parts, Spark. A design that is intuitive for *you* and that works for *you* does not necessarily work for *all*, nor is it necessarily the best way to do it bar none.
And the sooner you learn that a review *is* an opinion, the better. You want a facts-only list of changes and additions? Try reading CHANGELOG.
Spark wrote:
“This is the part that made me angry. Just as with proprietory software, there is “free” (as in no cost) Free Software and commercial Free Software. When comparing commercial proprietory software to Free Software, you have to compare it to commercial Free Software of course! …”
This is the *EXACT* attitude that will prevent Linux from ever being a desktop replacement. Saying it is unfair to compare a free solution to a commercial one when that free solution is trying to replace it is absolute hogwash!
Unless you compare yourself to the other solutions that the majority of people are using, commercial or free, you don’t have a leg to stand on. You have to give desktop users a reason to switch. The only reason to switch most users will see, is what the see on the monitor. Its all in what Gnome or KDE will provide to give users incentives to switch. If they don’t do that, or rely on a ‘commercial’ free solution, no one will ever run a desktop linux.
I don’t buy the line of thought, “Well a few configurations changes and my mother can use this OS now.” The point is, will she want to?
The screenshots you posted, showing the bar on the bottom… the bar is extremely UGLY, ugh… and it concerns me that the gnome developers still can’t get it right, and as far as environments, i’d much rather use kde, which as far as their latest version, looks good, and works correctly. apparently this can’t be said for gnome 2.
de Icaza the traitor is writing .NET implementation for Linux. The project’s name is Mono. Good name for a project supporting MONOpolist technology.
The project is financed by Ximian. I and my 27 *nix user friends uninstalled Gnome and installed KDE after learning Ximian started licking Bill’s certain body parts. If you want to read how they like it, go and read http://www.go-mono.org
While you are there, don’t forget thanking them for helping M$ and embracing their technology.
There will be no Gnome in my future.
The assumptions about the choices on settings sucks. G1 at least let you setup things how you wanted them. The comments in the original article were right on. I was looking forward to G2, but with each beta, I got more and more dissapointed. KDE 3 seems much more like a power users’s WM now. I think it’s pretty sad that G2 turned out the way it has.
I’m amazed at how some people can get off bashing GNU, kde, and other free software groups. I agree that the software isn’t always as polished as comercial software. However, fact of the matte is that its completely FREE! How can you argue with that?? People spend countless hours developing a desktop environment for the world to share and you decide to complain because it’s not meeting your “Windows/MacOS” expectations? I’m not saying youhave to like Gnome2 or any other OSS project out there, but you shouldn’t try to compare it to a comercial product. Personally, Im thankful to have an OS and graphical desktop environment absolutely free of charge.
i switched from gnome to kde three days ago and i dont regret it.
how can expect this to be good software.. weekly release cycles? haha.. maybe rc1 reached 5 users before rc2 was out.. no wonder they never got any bugreports.. it was NEVER alpha/beta tested..
But I’ll take it!
It’s no BeOS UI but considering that it’s a free Unix UI, it’s pretty good!
ciao
yc
Behind every dissatisfaction, there is always an unrealistic expectation. This is the fault of the person who is dissatisfied, not the object of the judgement. If the object (Gnome 2.0 in this case) led others to expect things that it couldn’t deliver, then it shares fault in the false expectations. There it would be wrong.
I see Gnome 2.0 as a “dot-zero” release, meaning “rushed out the door.” Maybe this is because I understand and consider the world of software development a little more than the reviewer. It is unfortunate that Gnome 2.0 didn’t live up to his expectations. I wish I knew his expectations in enumerated detail. Then I would be able to understand the review objectively. Thus far, I only understand his expectations partly, and they do not lead me to the same conclusion even given the same experiences described in the review.
Thus far I can’t say I’m excited about Gnome 2.0. I am in a state of “witholding judgement:” exactly what I was before reading the review. I just expect incompleteness in Software x.0 releases. Dot-one releases are still just a compromise. Only after the developers have gotten user feedback can the process reiterate, and the quality of the improvments is limited by the quality of the feedback.
The most important part of that feedback is the statement of expectations which translates directly into a goal for developers. If you weren’t around to make bug reports/feature requests on previous builds then you can expect the developers will deliver something that only partly intersects with your expectations. Voici: dissapointment. I wasn’t there either, but I understand that and account for it in my (lack of) judgement.
And certainly much faster than KDE3 at just about everything. Please do not just accept something eugenia has posted as a fact. 99% of all people that have tried GNOME 2.0 looks at it as way faster than GNOME 1.4, although Eugenia does not. That for me somehow implies that either Eugenia had a faulty GNOME-installation or Eugenia has a totally different outlook on things compared to others.
All apps start fast, and function fast in my experience. And Nautilus is orders of magnitude faster than in GNOME 1.x, and now opens new windows way faster than both Explorer and Konqueror on my Athlon 700 with 256MB ram.
The sad part is that some people now just accept whatever Eugenia has stated, without trying for themselves.
Props to Eugenia for an honest review, Linux will never get anywhere if we never examine it’s flaws.
> however gnome insists on using the windows for
> the menues just like Windows.
Using the top menu for the applications would be a real
pain for peoples not using the “focus follows the mouse”
feature: If you leave the window to reach the top menu,
this top menu would be replaced the menu of any other
application you are traversing.
I don’t consider the release to be an end user release, with end user being your average person. To me this is a release to the distributors and the application developers, like the rh/suse/debian/gimp/gqview/insert your thing here project.
I think one of the main things here to look at, is that this is a PLATFORM release, where as the basic building blocks are there and available to put together into a usable end product.
I agree that if you download the source and compile it, you will be dissapointed overall if you are an average user. If you are a developer however, you will be thinking “cool, my app will look much better, there will be consistency with other gnome2 apps, I have much better support for keyboard navigation….yada yada yada”.
Overall just a nicer framework to build a better desktop from.
Best thing about free software: IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, THEN SPEND YOUR MONEY AND GET SOMETHING ELSE.
For me, I’d rather give my money to the people who give something back. So that someday somewhere someone who’s money is worth 1/12th of a US dollar can afford have a decent word processor in their schools.
It’s gonna be a while before GNOME2 is ready to replace GNOME1 for most people, and that’s just life.
Dan
From a headline of a major website I expected a more objective and less personal review. I can really understand most of her complaints but this ‘diary’ seems to be more a review of a bad day/mood then a review of a gnome2.
Gnome2 is not without bugs, but what’s the use of attaching two screenshots with error messages?
“Props to Eugenia for an honest review, Linux will never get anywhere if we never examine it’s flaws.”
Linux does not need to have it’s flaws examined, nor Gnome or any other big projects, users and developers like me and others already do it and if they want to or have the knowledge they may report it and try to debuggit.
We appreciate your dedication to other Operative Systems and Desktop Enviroments than yours, but really, we know what goes wrong or what would be better, it’s just we don’t have enough time to fix it or we like it the ¿un?intuitive way it is. Windows, Mac or Beos users, you’re desktops and systems are perfect? maybe there is that small thing bitching around and you would like to tell to your software distributor about it, though the code to be fixed thanks to your cooperation would never reach anybody else but the owner of the code, and you will never be paid for that, better than that, you will pay them for next service pack or upgrade.
Again, thank you for your commitment to the opensource software, but please, don’t remind us about the flaws, fix them, and if you don’t like it AS IT IS (you can read it everywhere) feel free to not to use it.
yours: nestor di
>Another slightly differet approach seems to be that of Oeone.com (they are looking for an UI designer right now), I haven’t tried it.
I’ve worked with OEOne in the Mozilla Calendar Project (they contributed the code and continue to work on it). My experience from calendar is that their UI design is hit and miss, while there’s nothing to make the Interface Hall of Shame, there isn’t much novelty either. The people working on calendar are great and are working to improve their app, other programs may be better or worse, YMMV.
Some of you may think that I wouldn’t be much worth listening to because I don’t really know much about linux. Oh, I use linux, but I’m a recent convert from Windows.
But you see, all of you out there who like the idea of linux capturing the desktop market should be listening to people like me, because we’re the ones you need to win over.
Now, the author of the article complained that with gnome and the direction it’s moving, it’s no wonder Linux isn’t taking over the desktop, and I just wanted to say how wrong that sounds to me. Now, I can’t give my experience with Gnome 2.0 as backup, because I’m the sort that will have to wait for Redhat 7.4 or 8.0 or whatever will come next, or else for Ximian to start sending out 2.0. Until that happens, I don’t know well enough how to install it.
And that’s the sort of thing that keeps Linux from getting the desktop. I’m not a computer idiot, exactly. I’ve been working on IT staffs since I was sixteen, but I don’t have the time or resources to figure out Linux installs. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever sucessfully installed something on linux. It’s always some unresolved dependancy or something. Even following what instructions I can find, instructions complicated enough I know my parents would never be able to figure it out, alterations to my system never work. I just install Redhat or something and leave the system more or less as it is (except changing between pre-installed themes or altering size and position of panels)
So I’ll tell you why Linux can’t capture the desktop market-
Everyone’s arguing about things like the interface looking too much like windows or whatever, while something like getting an up-to-date version of netscape or a DVD player just doesn’t work without a proceedure that’s too complicated from an end-user point of view. The only easy setup or install in linux is the original installation if you use Redhat or Mandrake. While everyone’s patting themselves on the back for detachable menus and multiple workspaces, a lot of real problems don’t get addressed.
Now, there are three guidelines that Linux developers should really learn to stick to. In order: Make it work – Keep it simple – Make it pretty. It seems to me that a number of major distributions have been making great strides in accomplishing these guidelines and I find Ximian a pretty impressive developement.
From what I’ve seen (screenshots and such) and heard (even this article), it seems that Gnome 2.0 has at least made things simpler and prettier, and so this article, if anything, makes me look forward to getting Gnome 2.0 on my desktop. I’d be willing to bet that by the time Redhat or Ximian put it out, those developers will work out many of the problems listed by the reviewer, and so, over all, I’m very optimistic.
I started using free software some time ago, my first linux was redhat 6.0 (my “evolution”: redhat->debian->freeBSD->netBSD … in the search of unix or solitude, who knows) and from that early time I prefered gnome over kde despite the former being not even remotely as stable or usable as the later. What made me make that choise, was a mix of its look, icons, speed and configurability. I was just amazed with the posibility of having multiple panels, applets, placing pagers and task bar not as a unique fixed part of the desktop but rather as another applet like the rest so that I could place then wherever I wanted, and being able to customize it all in so many diferent topologies (something KDE lacked to that extend back then as I remember). That, gave me the feeling of how modular gnome was, something important when you are a progranmer (like me). Since then, both products as changed a lot, KDE though keeping its general look, has been gaining in configurability year after year (to the abuse of it, I would add), sadly (at least to me, after reading this and other articles and having seen many screenshots), gnome has done from 1.x to 2.0 exactly the opossed. I still use gnome (have used kde but still like what first apealed me from gnome, in few words: “arrange it the way you like”) and after reading all this I just start wondering: Has it finally come the time to switch for me? Is it possible that the backing gnome developers are having from big companies like Sun and others is finally forking the project to a more “standard, user friendly and realistic platform for a wider market”? Some times it is not the money what counts, but merely the influence, the stronger and important point of view of a few. I read the news in this and other sites on a regular basis and a get the feeling that the gnome comunity (at least the ones who post their coments everywhere I read: gnome.org, slashdot.org, osnews.com to name a few), keep complaining on the way the project is heading to. Are these the opinions of the comunity? Are you all representing must of it? If so, how come is gnome, being a FREE and comunity project as everybody says, raising so many complains? Do all these people out there who use it day after day and post their critics decide something? Do all you who (like me) keep loyal to this beautiful piece of software, really count for its future?
Sorry for my English.
Wow! I don’t know why it is, but why on earth does *everybody* using an alternative operating system consider themselves interface experts? This discussion reminds me so much of countless ones in regards to Mac OS X it pains me. Consult Ilan Volow’s post for the quintessential example… notice how claims are never backed up with anything aside from a link to what ultimately ends up being a quesitonable site.
Regardless. What makes me sicker is the amount of pressure that has been placed on the GNOME developers to get this release out the door, and, now, the amount of disappointment from the userbase. This is absolutely atrotious behavior on our parts, users! We mustn’t damn volunteers for their hard work! This is not unlike telling a group working for habitat for humanity, “though I have been cracking the whip at you to finish building this house, and you’ve finally finished it, look at this shoddy workmanship! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Sickening.
For the record, I agree with Eugenia in that GNOME 2 is currently lacking polish, is relatively unstable, and just plain needs some more work. However, I wouldn’t dare say a bad word about it, since it’s an impressive effort, and I am very pleased with the progress and polish they have managed to incorporate.
And to the pimple-faced adolescent who wrote “Gnome 2? NO! Not since Ximian started liking M$.”… you’re exactly why people hate Linux. Congratulations.
I have a couple of remarks about this review.
First off, I’d like to state I’m a happy user of Gnome2 and Debian. (I have worked with varying degrees with BeOS, MacOS (a lot), MacOS X, KDE2/3, Windows95-2000, and with other distros like Redhat/Slackware/…) Just so everyone is clear about my bias.
* First off, I think a lot of what you say in the article is, even though it may be a valid remark, a matter of personal taste. You remark that the default two-panel thing is a horrible waste, but for instance I find it more logical to separate “running apps” with the taskbar/ws switcher from the “launchers” – menu’s status applets etc. It works for me on 800×600 res on my laptop. and xinerama 1600×1200. But then again that is my personal taste.
Getting defaults right may be a tricky thing, but you nor I have done the usability research (inviting newbies to sit down in front of a default installation) to be able to say: this is wrong. At best we can say: “I feel this is wrong for this and this reason”. Again, personally, I would hate the default you chose.
* Yes there’s a lot of stuff missing, stuff that was even in Gnome 1, like a pref panel for screensavers. But I’m glad they released when they did. I’m sure it’s hard to develop against a moving target. I’m sure it will get fixed pretty soon.
* It seems you have stuff I don’t: I only have Theme in Desktop preferences. As for your remark that everything (all the pref panels) are scattered all over the place, I only have “Desktop Preferences”. There’s only one place. In Nautilus you can access it with “preferences:”. I guess this is a gnome-distro issue.
* As for gtkkhtml in Nautilus – I’m sure you’re aware that mozilla _and_ galeon can be embedded in Nautilus too, and this will come very soon (i think it’s waiting for mozilla on gtk2 to stabilize, not sure).
* The universal media player didn’t make it for gnome2. But it’s coming (gstreamer.net, http://www.rhythmbox.org).
* No reason Galeon needed to stop working. Not a problem on my distro.
* I agree on language keyboard/internationalization settings. Guess they haven’t been added yet either.
* I agree om Systemmonitor with 2 cpu’s. Something like pulse is always nice to watch. (have a dual cel550 too) But this is really nitpicking on details.
* Didn’t try Gedit2 yet, but I believe what you say, and that should definately not happen. I hope it’ll get fixed sooner rather than later.
* I also have a hard time not getting annoyed when I read what you say about the help system. Just say that without a help it’s not ready to be recommended to newbies which is a valid statement. But don’t go off ranting about how bad “linux” is.
* Your statement that it does less is spot on. MacOS always had a policy of hiding stuff from the users, to simplify the desktop. Unlike MacOS, power users can reasonably easy change their settings. That’s the way it should be imho. Again, you are right about some of the missing functionality though.
* Lastly, I’d like to again bring up dependency hell in linux, or rather the lack of it in debian. I’m sure it’s been said before, but I can’t stop myself from telling about it, especially considering I keep hearing both you and other users complain about dependency problems.
Debian solves it better than Windows and others ever did. Installing and uninstalling stuff in windows always leaves cruft, to the point that doing that alot becomes actually dangerous to the stability of the system. No reboots ever. No thousand different acting installer apps.
In one word: consistency.
On top of, if there’s questions that need to be answered about a package, they are all asked using a consistent (and if so desired, graphical) interface.
Dependencies are necessary unless you want to statically link all apps (think things are bloated now?) or have zero granularity (install all or nothing).
Heh. Now _I’m_ ranting. 🙂
So, the first thing you attack Gnome for is its (admittedly quite annoying) menu panel at the top (which was the default since Gnome 1.4). You then tell us how you removed the taskbar panel at the bottom, but kept the menu panel at the top. You also criticize Gnome for it’s bad defaults, saying that many people will be unable to change the defaults, but then subsequently criticize Gnome for its lack of preferences.
So which is it? Gnome offers lots of configuration options, that people actually need. If you want to get rid of your menu panel, *go right ahead*. That’s the very first thing I do any time I use Gnome. After that, I create an aligned panel, and delete the original panel at the bottom. In Gnome, there are five panel types: Menu, edge (standard), corner (includes centered), sliding (position anywhere alongside one edge of the screen), or floating (position anywhere, a la geOShell bars). *And those are all the options you need*.
KDE’s philosophy is to provide an option for everything. If you want to configure your desktop to look like something, it’s undoubtedly possible in KDE. But that means there’s also way, way, way too many options; I don’t even know what 9 out of 10 applets in the KDE control center are, let alone what they do!
Some of the other inconsistencies you describe are due to your setup; when I installed Gnome2, all I had to do was type ‘urpmi gnome-desktop’, and it was there, no ordering of package-installing necessary. Others are inherent, due to the weakness of integration (and newness of themes) on all platforms; not just Gnome, but also KDE, Windows, and Mac OS all have two different panels for “Theme” and “Desktop Theme”. KDE’s are called “Style” and “Theme”; Windows’ are called “Display” and “Desktop Theme” (where it exists); in my opinion, the Gnome names are actually the best of the three.
Gnome is of course not perfect. Metacity still isn’t as integrated as it should be; too many crucial applications are still using GTK, and the Galeon window actually contains three different types of widgets (Gtk2-metacity, Gtk-Galeon, XUL-HTML widgets). GConf doesn’t come automatically with a nice editor, and gconf-editor isn’t the most stable thing I’ve ever used. But Gnome2 is already better than Gnome1; and the concepts of integrated desktop/widget library and a configuration system much better than flat files hold much promise for the future. Don’t count Gnome out already simply because some application maintainers who aren’t part of the Gnome project haven’t yet ported over their applications, or because you need to take 30 seconds to delete the menu panel the first time you use the desktop.
Give Gnome a chance.
RPM is the bane of broad level accpetance, because like you said, upgrade dependencies suck. Look at gentoo, it sounds like you might be technically competent enough to work your way through the few (<6) hours of babysitting it takes to get it working. It whould be very informative and your install problems might go away. I am in the process of bailing on my 4th or 5th RedHat or Mandrake system install because of RPM. I recently read about Gentoo, and I’m going for it. It appears to manage most, if not all of the dependency issues for you.
Spark, thank you for defending open source.
Eugenia, you can disagree with the product, but to then conclude that somehow this is just one more proof of the inability of Open Source to be able to compete with Microsoft/Apple OS’s is indefensible, and you know it. Spark, you are arguing the details of the placement of taskbars and other items, when the real message that Eugenia appears to be pushing is that Open Source isn’t capable of competing effectively for desktop dominance. I almost get the impression that you’d like it to succeed, Eugenia, but that you are dismayed at what you perceive as yet another failure. In your dismay, however, it appears that you’re attacking the methods used as incapable of producing something you find acceptible.
Get in there and help. Suggest improvements, and on the other hand, do some research and find out how to help.
Or you could just blast the group, and of course they’ll turn a deaf ear to any advice you may have…, oh wait you just did that. Congratulations, you’ve dismayed a whole host of newbies who could have helped, if they went into the experience with a positive attitude, and looking to help/contribute/learn about their computers, or didn’t know to expect to not like it.
As a longtime linux “lover”,
Thank you for spreading and promoting M$-type FUD, about Open Source…
You’re running Mandrake Cooker and you expect GNOME to be stable? Cooker is constantly under heavy development (it is the development branch of Mandrake), and many of its packages are often broken. You really should’ve waited for official packages before doing this review.
To review a product and not speak of it’s flaws and shortcomings because of a notion that everyone knows what they are anyway is absolutely ridiculous. A review like that – now *that* would be a PR press release. Keep telling it as you see it, Eugenia, we can take and, if there is disagreement, all the better to hash it out and let new ideas surface.
Eugenia which panel preferences have you had crash.
I ask because I have been reasonably involved with gnome2 since about feb, and may be able to help
Thank you to your very thorough response and additional links. I take it you must be some kind of UI specialist or consultant.
I fail to see what all the hype about these desktops, Gnome and Kde, is about. It seems unjustified. As I previously indicated, Gnome and Kde are not just desktops and are not primarily desktops, although any Gnome or Kde app can bring a lot of overhead with it when started in another environment. And I think a number of Window Managers which have been available for quite a while and which stable and eminently themable are much more attractive environments to use that either Gnome or Kde. They keep out of your way. Gnome and Kde should be used to develop apps. Instead they are each trying to be “the” desktop for linux and unix users. We already have one, thank you, which is simply “x”.
You can gripe about X but it’s easy capacity to provide multiple desktops and workspaces and keeping the gui separate from the rest of the system can’t be touched by commercial operating systems. OSx is a hybrid. No, I don’t think Mac OSX with all the bells and whistles is nearly as useful as a simple window managaer + apps with Linux. MS Windows is not even a player in the competition.
So what do Gnome and Kde add? Mostly a lot of bloat and bugs. There is much hype about embedding and communication among apps on the desktop but most users just want to be able to start their apps and navigate around the desktops easily.
Of course they want a visually attractive environment, but you can make your desktop as pretty or ugly as you want with Linux.
Desktop Java has failed for the same reason that Gnome and Kde are slow and bloated and buggy. It sounds good in theory but actually implementing it in an efficient manner is not so easy. There has been almost no progress on the desktop I can see since the early Amigas in the late 1980’s, early Mac’s, and a few concepts in Os2 which were well implemented and later used in Win 95 and 98. Nothing wrong with that – perhaps nothing revolutionary is needed. What is needed is simplicity.
In closing, you really seem interested in dekstop usability either from a professional or personal point of view, I’m not sure which. There’s a lot which can be improved in usability but I think that is most easily achieved by keeping it simple. It’s too late for Kde to do that now because their system is so heavily structured but perhaps it’s possible for Gnome not to compound the damage by, for example, actually using CORBA and bonobo in situations where they are not needed. And they are almost never needed.
Maybe I need to learn some things about “reviews”. Personally, I expected a certain amount of objectivity. I may be wrong. I was appalled at the strong EMOTION.
She starts off with:
“The project was supposed to see this release almost a year ago, but GTK+ 2.0 was not ready in time, dragging Gnome’s development down as well. But now it is here, so let’s see what this new release brings to the Unix desktop.”
and it’s all downhill from here…
As a Linux user, a software developer, a disenchanted former Windows user, and an admittedly biased advocate of Open Source, I find this review, slightly useful, but very inflamatory.
I had to sift through the landmine phrases like:
“It sits on the top of the desktop, and no matter what I tried, I can’t change its position. The window list can be found on the bottom of the screen. So, you get two gnome panels, one on the top and one on the bottom. I found this default configuration, bone-headed, at best.”
Bone-headed…, ok, why insult the intelligence of the developers?
“I am sorry if I sounded harsh about the ‘bonehead’ word earlier, but this is 2x boneheaded. Every UI designer will laugh at this default setup … ”
Sorry, I think the invocation of the opinion of “Every UI designer” is one of the rudest statements I’ve ever read in a review. Editorials, between bitter rivals, I would understand… A friggin product review, it’s irresponsible.
“A commercial company would have never ship an OS or desktop environment with no real Help files. If this is how open source works, there would not be a chance that I would recommend any of this to my friends or family.”
My whole objection to this article is in this statement right here. There’s a pervasive sense of frustration on Eugenia’s part as evidenced by the first statement about how she’s been “anticipating it’s release with impatience”. Then an admission of the loss of some work on a buggy editor.
“Oh, and I lost almost 2 paragraphs from this review, by typing it on the GTK+ 2.x updated Gedit text editor (which is also the default Gnome text editor).”
My whole point really is this:
As a consumer of this opinion, I didn’t like it. I felt the author brought too much emotional attachment to this review. Therefore rendering it unsavory and offensive to someone simply looking for the good and bad aspects of the current 2.0 product.
I did feel that I got managed to glean some good and bad from this article that I do feel is useful. But from the comments written in response to this “review” her research was bad in that she didn’t find any expert opinions on GUI Design (Mr. PhD thesis helped there) and she didn’t compare the speed with any other machines or other user’s experiences to find out if her perceptions where the exception or the rule… Turns out it may in fact be true that the 2.0 does outperform 1.4 based on the responses from people like Spark and from others.
Perhaps, in the future reviews of this sort should be done by person’s on the staff who don’t have such strong feelings about it?
My two cents,
But obviously if this is the type of product that is preferred by OSNews’s customers, I’ll go elsewhere for my reviews
I cant say I read the full review, the author broke into a critisism of the configuration.
I cant say I ever keep the default config of any desktop environment.I spend 30 minutes deleting icons from win2k desktop, I run a olvwm under solaris. On linux I run ximian gnome, personally i think the menus are a mess from a default install. I have looked at kde 2.x several times, and i think its desktop layout is even more chaotic than gnome (no I havent tried kde3). Personally I like light weight desktops, as minimalistic as possible. This is all personal opinion, I know users who have their entire win2k desktop covered in icons.
I think it is a bad way to start a review by bashing the default config, it simply makes me wonder about your intentions.
Finally the gnome 2 release is a source code release, if you want to see the properly configured system wait for the ximian distribution. I’m sure this will ahve all sorts of default settings to choose from, along with lots of (broken?) menus.
The WM I happen to be looking forward to is Enlightenment 17. So I am no Gnome fanatic, but I think you style of review is just plain bad.
Thanks for the review Eugenia! You are someone who finally told it like it is even though you knew you’d get flamed for it. Linux users need to get a clue and realize that the Gnome installation process is too hard (dependencies) and the Gnome GUI isn’t very good (buggy).
These users say “if you want easy use windows.” Guess what? A lot of people say “ok, I will” and another user drops linux. I for one don’t have time to mess around all day trying to get some “great” desktop working, if an easy installation and stable software is asking too much then Linux on the desktop is dead.
well, i was embarrassed. compiled gnome2 from source on my slack box, and was amazed at the elegance, and stability.
compiled latest KDE for comparison reasons, and equally stable, but as my wife pointed out while looking at KDE
“it looks like it’s for kids.”
which i agree, but that’s neither here or there.
this review, with the bits about nautilus not a mature web browser(sorry, it’s a file manager…), the mis-understanding of what gnomeaudio was and does, and not being able to understand how to get to preferences in nautilus…
made me cringe. everything that was available to be configured in gnome 1.4 is available in gnome2. the control center (of which i had been running the unstable)
simply has it’s abilities listed in applications menu
under settings instead of a pop-up panel.
i would think if one finds this disturbing, make a short-cut and copy it to your desktop.
but my impression reading this was the reviewer was very poorly versed in gnome, window managers, and desktop Linux in general.
“For example, you get two different panels ‘Desktop Theme’ and
‘Theme’ under the Desktop Preferences sub menu, and then you get a ‘Desktop
Theme Editor’ option on your System Tools. Now, which is which and what each
does? Good question.”
is a good example of what i man.
well, gnome has themes, and your window manager has themes.
as in sawfish, while it does you your specified gtk theme,
it also has “skins” for window drawing. so “one place” to set a theme would rather limit ones ability to configure the look and feel, wouldn’t it?
so sad.
gnome on slack since i can remember, this gnome is the most elegant, smartly designed form of i have seen.
with KDE 3X i had actually switched over, as it was a pleasant package, but the sleekness of gnome i do prefer to the saturday morning cartoon feel of KDE.
just my opinion, as this review is Eugenia’s opinion.
pardon me for feeling mine is more educated.
k.
You complain about not having enough options in the menu, when Sun’s usability study showed that too much confuses the user. I think gnome 2 tried to take some of the issues and recommentations from that study into consideration. but now u complain.
Actually, most WinXP users replace the whole desktop without even realizing it. Every time a bug is fixed in the GDI and the WinXP (or 2K or 95 or whatever) and the fix is included in a service pack, the key files that implement the GUI (gdi32.dll, explorer.exe, etc) are replaced by the service pack. In fact, even the kernel and tons of other core files are replaced by the service pack. Ever wonder why they were nearly a hundred megs in size?
Actually, most WinXP users replace the whole desktop without even realizing it. Every time a bug is fixed in the GDI and the WinXP (or 2K or 95 or whatever) and the fix is included in a service pack, the key files that implement the GUI (gdi32.dll, explorer.exe, etc) are replaced by the service pack. In fact, even the kernel and tons of other core files are replaced by the service pack. Ever wonder why they were nearly a hundred megs in size?
These are not mine, I saw them on pclinuxonline.com discussion forum
http://www.gnome.org/~roman/GNOME2-Shots/GNOME_2.0+Gimp_1.3.7.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~roman/GNOME2-Shots/GNOME_2.0+Metatheme+Yelp.j…
http://www.gnome.org/~roman/GNOME2-Shots/GNOME_2.0+Nautilus_2.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~roman/GNOME2-Shots/GNOME_2.0+X-Chat_1.9.1+Con…
http://www.gnome.org/~roman/GNOME2-Shots/GNOME_2.0-Desktop.jpg
http://www.gnome.org/~roman/GNOME2-Shots/GNOME_2.0-Setup.jpg
Yesterday, everybody yelled and went apeshit banannas because the six degrees article wasn’t “hard-hitting” — they claimed osnews was just adertising.
Today, Eugenia gives a straight-up report on gnome 2, and everybody yelled and went apeshit banannas because she had the temerity to not bow down before the One True Desktop’s Mighty Goodness and Beauty.
To those of you who understand that Eugenia was describing her experience, and are intelligent enough to not base their thoughts 100% on it, I say kudos — you’re smart, rational people. Install gnome 2 yourself, see if you like it, and if you do, by all means use it.
To the rest of you, grow the f*ck up. It’s just a desktop — if you percieve Eugenia’s comments as a critique upon yourselves (unless you are an actively contributing GNOME developer) you’ve got some serious identity issues.
Repeat after me: You are not what you own, & you are not your *nix desktop.
Although i do not use gnome because of its inferior usability,
i instantaneously noticed that the file selection dialogs were improved.
Now there are a few (two?) icons for comfortably changing
the directory.
Each time i use an old gnome application it enrages me
that i have to navigate through the whole directory tree.
Once i planned to use Gnome because of its
faster startup times and its better memory consumption.
But KDE 2 is a way ahead of gnome if you consider the
loss of time when you have to cope with unpractical UI design.
Gnome 2 is not the change i hoped for.
I _want_ to use Gnome instead of the bloated KDE.
Free me from kandalf’s spell!
the metatheme bit…
it isn’t actually included in the 2.0.0 “release”
it’s located in 2.0.0 sources.
or under unstable…
*cough* *cough*
yeah….
>”it looks like it’s for kids.”
>
>which i agree, but that’s neither here or there.
>
>[snip]
>gnome on slack since i can remember, this gnome is the most elegant, smartly designed form of i have seen.
>with KDE 3X i had actually switched over, as it was a pleasant package, but the sleekness of gnome i do >prefer to the saturday morning cartoon feel of KDE.
That of course is what KDE themes are for – you must know about themes, ’cause you go on about them enough in your rather blatant troll.
If the desktop was as good as some of the apps – Gnumeric, GIMP etc, I could understand why folks feel they have to defend gnome at all costs. As it stands for end users, the gnome desktop has been pretty static for some time, whilst KDE has improved considerably – you do need to play with KDE3 for a while though before you can appreciate just how much better it is than 2.2.2. For folks that find it too bloated – fine, use a more lightweight desktop/manager – that’s the joy of having choice. I’ve just built a new PC for £300 based around a Duron 1300, 512M PC2100, 60G 7200 hdd and performance really isn’t an issue anymore!
As it stands, KDE has the desktop minus the apps, and gnome has the apps minus the desktop – a bit simplistic, but a fairly realistic view IMHO. The good side to this is that a little rivalry should help to speed development for both camps – for that we should all be glad
Every Gnome supporter mentions how great the AA fonts are.
Now, what is the big deal? Windows has it for years and KDE
has it since KDE 2.2.2. (Even earlier if you went through the
hassle to install it on your own. Since 2.2.2 it is one click away
when you first time start your desktop after installation.)
After reading the review, I became convinced that sticking with
KDE is the best decision, at least for now.
Maybe Gnome3?
LU
(before you read this, if you don’t like long comments, sometimes like myself, then you might want to skip over this, as it kinda long)
Eugenia, first of all I want to thank you. I’ve been waiting for the 2.0 release myself, but I’m glad to see someone took the time to install it and beat it up a little bit to show some of the bugs, the advatages, and other aspects of it. I do, also, agree with some of the people whom have commented. Normally .0 releases are never “perfect”. To me, nothing is ever “perfect” it could always be needing improvements, altho a lot of stuff I have used have been Great.
A little background info on myself. When I first started with Linux, back in about 98′, I started out with Redhat 5.1. I then moved to Mandrake as I heard it was better. It was at this time I setup a small server for me and my friends. When this happened, I got hacked, and almost lost everything. It was at that point I started asking different people I knew whom where into linux already what was the best Distro. What I ended up coming to was Slackware (7.1 I believe at the time). I’ve been using slackware since that time. Recently I tried Gentoo on one of my machines, but since my laptop is a 266, I’ve stuck with Slack 8.1.
I first started with KDE, and I’ve always used that. Then in the past year, I switched to gnome. The reason is, is that I wanted something easier (to my anyway) to use, and I wanted something I could REALLY configure to how I wanted it. I’ve been pleased with 1.x with nautilus. I’ve been waiting for the 2.0 release since I first heard it was in development. THe problem was is the last few months of school got really heactic(sp?) so I wasn’t on the computer much at all.
To me, its what fits you. If Windows works better for you, then use it. If *nix works better for you, then use it. For myself, I find that Linux works better for what I do when I’m on the computer. In this case, if I see a point in which linux might be good, I recomment it to people. But I NEVER FORCED Anyone to use it. I believe in choice.
I’m glad to see gnome coming along will (in my aspects), but I know it needs works. I’m really excited to see all that Linux and *nix, in general, are moving along.
My one problem that I have with current *nix users, and people whom have looked at it are people who think that the Open Source stuff is going to look just like Windows. Personally, I don’t want my Linux desktop looking like Windows XP. It has its own look to it. Each user can configure the desktop and setting to how they like it, and I think this is what give the Open Source Movement Strength. However, I can see to get users over to Open Source, to make it like they are use to it, but I think this is going to be a while in the making.
Well, as the subject says, this is just my $0.02 cents. And yes, I will be trying gnome 2.0 in a few days. Again, I want to thank Eugenia for writing the review, and the other users whom have commented. You have given me a new outlook on Linux, GUI’s, and what is to come.
I love all the comments posted here.
Thanks euguenia for provoking thoughts.
“Developer release” is an important point.
Regarding *nix desktop’s, more info should be provided as to the DE’s opertation. The users aint dumb.
All DE’s have new methods of internal workings, these should be made aware to the user, without the need to hunt for info on the NET. Linux is impossible without the NET.
Computers are computers. Try reading english without the education.
I hate help files that repeat what is obvious. If a menu command does stuff with a file, at least help should tell me. Not a news group.
Is it possible every body agrees with that?
Maybe the subject peace isnt apropriate.
rvdp.
<snip>
>>with KDE 3X i had actually switched over, as it was a >>pleasant package, but the sleekness of gnome i do
>>prefer to the saturday morning cartoon feel of KDE.
>That of course is what KDE themes are for – you must know >about themes, ’cause you go on about them enough in your >rather blatant troll.
<snip>
yup. after playing with kde a bit,(hate to have been misleading but “with KDE 3X i switched over, as it was a pleasant package” had meant to say i preferred it over GNOME 1.4 and was running it default.) i had it looking more to my taste, as this is what themes are for…
and yet i still maintain, i like the look of gnome2 better, themes not considered… which, rather is my opinion, which i think i mentioned.
defending gnome? more of defending gnome against a review i found rather a bit to the left.
so hush now. KDE is nice too. i used it by default up until gnome2, which i like more.
” that’s the joy of having choice. ”
play nice now…
I have to disagree with the article. I have been using gnome2 for some time, compiled with the vicious-build-scripts. As of the 2.0 release, I have not had a single crash in days. I personally love the MacOS feel of the default setup. Although I recognize that people will differ on this, I am glad they did it the way they did.
That being said, there are some falsehoods in the article. For one, no, gnome2 definatly does not depend on any 1.4 libraries, as stated in the sound portion. ESD is included in the 2.0 release.
In short, I seem to have a 180 degree different experience than the author.
They are pretty indeed. But this is Ximian Gnome, which includes many changes in the sources and the way Gnome behaves. Here we reviewed the Gnome 2.0, not Ximian’s version of Gnome.
If the Gnu Gnome project could incorporate back some of the ximian changes (like the ability to center the gnome panel like the OSX Dock) it would be a welcome change/addition.
But the *defaults* of Gnome, really need a lot of thought still.
> If the Gnu Gnome project could incorporate back some of
> the ximian changes (like the ability to center the gnome
> panel like the OSX Dock) it would be a welcome
> change/addition.
You can’t even spend 5-20 minutes configuring the panels the way you want, and you insist that you installed this properly? Hah! You must have a real short attention spand, because 2 people here told you how to create a centered panel.
First, stop tring to build it yourself–or atleast, next time around, read the requirements & recommending ordering. Otherwise, you need to wait on your distribution’s packages to be more complete.
Delete the menu panel, since you obviously don’t like it and you obviously don’t want to take the time to configure it properly. Secondly, create a centered panel and add all the goodies you want… Not too difficult for most people.
I don’t even LIKE Eugenia, but she’s 100% on target with this review. It may have cleaned up a ton of old stuff, but it’s still the same, old, confused Gnome.
This is more of a review on how terrible things can be if you don’t read documentation try to do complicated things with no insight.
You can have the panel centered.
Create a “Corner Panel” first, then center in properties windown.
Took me a while too.
Not what I expected.
BTW nice review, a bit harsh though. Anyways, for most people gnome 2 will look like the distributor wants, not cvs defaults.
Did you know there is a gnome project for better defaults? (forgot url
Rob
PS: I like controversial discussions but I think some people don’t know how to read (your) reviews. Or they just take everything too serious.
I am talking about default configurations here cowboy. That’s the whole point of creating a successful and user friendly desktop. If you are expecting people to spend 20 mins to configure things, or 1 hour for first-time gnome users to configure stuff, say bye-bye to Gnome’s success.
You got no idea about marketing and usability and how things should work on a product. Go read JoelOnSoftware and then come back and discuss the future of the GNU desktop.
My main problem with Gnome is that it is the same old, same old. It brings NOTHING new to the UI universe. It has no revolutionary concepts. As I said in the article, it just fails to impress me. Give me a GOOD REASON why should I switch away from my XP PRO and my MacOSX machine, and use Gnome. WHY?
Because it is FREE? I am sorry, but I got that G4 Cube for free too. And I got XP PRO only for $30, as OEM. So, I did not really paid anything for them. Other users did, but I did not. So, again, tell me. Why should I use Gnome, when it works WORSE (as an overall desktop environment) than XP or OSX?
If GNU wants people to use their GUI, they need to do breakthroughs. They need to be BETTER than the commercial offerings. Just by saying “ours is free”, it is just not good enough. Better buy something and have something better, than something that is Free but it sucks goats (that gnu goat specifically).
You can have as much love as you want for Gnome, but I don’t. I don’t like any of the X offerings as a production level desktop environment, and even the companies like Sun and IBM agree. KDE 3 is in my opinion better than Gnome, but even KDE lacks a lot of things, and I was thinking of writting a UI tech paper about KDE’s shortcomings too. What, you think I forgot the Qt guys? Hah! You bet I didn’t! If I don’t write about it, they would not know it either. By pointing fingers to faults, it is the only way we can udentify and fix these faults.
And no matter what breakthroughs Gnome or KDE may bring in the future, if they do not decide to fix the damned copy/paste between all the X/QT/GTK+ apps (no, I don’t mean the middle-click paste), the X desktop environment is going nowhere in general.
The Gnome project needs a UI designer. And a good one. NO MATTER IF THEY HAVE TO PAY HIM/HER, they need one! Not many good UI designers are doing stuff for free, for open source, as developers do, so they might have to EMPLOY one. But the bottomline is, they need one. Or two.
This review is suppose is honest, and I admit that Gnome’s not the most user-friendly DE in existence, but you can’t compare it to an environment like Windows or MacOS. Those both have massive companies throwing thousands (millions?) of dollars into their development, and are expected to be a finished polished release. Gnome is made by hackers, for free, without corporate giant financially backing it. But I still think its better than Windows.
And Gnome 2 is not bloated. Gnome 2 runs faster than Gnome 1 does on my computer (and I hand build them both, no rpms for me). You want to see a bloated DE, log into KDE and watch your system resources. Its obscene, considering KDE3 is barely better than KDE2, yet way more bloated. So there.
Amen, sister
I always find it sad when you try to talk about usability and people come with “you can skin it, fool”. They just don’t understand.
oh.
well this response brings your article sharply into focus for me. you seem to fall into the “i just want to click ‘Next'” catagory.
OEM xp eh? so you really don’t know default configurations
there either..
i can’t say i’m surprised. although it does do a bit of explaining why your review smacked of ignorance.
but i digress.
by all means, i would heartily suggest you stick with XP
or your mac.
you seem suited to each other.
>by all means, i would heartily suggest you stick with XP
>or your mac.
How little you know me. 😉
For me, the best UI would be something between BeOS and XP. Some features missing from BeOS can be found on XP, but many features missing on XP can all be found on BeOS.
Create a UI that fixes problems of both these platforms, add nice graphics for the widgets (but not too bold as OSX’s), and then come back and we will talk again.
In my time, I have used from QNX RtP, down to ALL X environments, AtheOS, OS/2, BeOS, Windows, Mac… I know my stuff, and I have worked as a UI designer at my previous work.
> you seem to fall into the “i just want to click ‘Next'” catagory.
That is the reality of the “Desktop”. If you want to have perplexed desktops, you better stay with the command line. Seriously.
>OEM xp eh? so you really don’t know default onfigurations
there either..
I have the *full boxed* legal version of XP, by bought at an OEM price.
The average `Joe User’ also won’t be running Mandrake Cooker and attempting to mess with the build files.
The average user will use Ximian’s builds, especially on Redhat/Mandrake, because they are by far easier to manage. Users, like myself, on Debian, will be happy waiting a few days for a properly built distribution. For others, GARNOME is the best solution because it allows you to fill out all needed packages and takes away the pain of–oh, and don’t get scared–reading the release notes on the proper build. ;P
Whether you care to admit or not, you didn’t install GNOME 2.0 correctly. You failed to notice the fact that some things from 1.4 are required, and that this _is_ a dot-one distribution, with expected bugs (tons of which are known, and will be fixed with 2.0.1 or however they up it).