How do I get it? I’m running Ubuntu, which only provides security fixes, so unless I switch to the ‘development’ repository (which pulls in loads of other stuff and isn’t properly supported) I’m stuck. I’ve looked into other distros and the situation is the same.
So basically I’ve got to compile the whole lot from source, or start using a mid-development distro to get it. Why can’t I just double-click a file or two like in so many other OSes?
This is really why Linux needs some form of API, ABI and platform stability. This new GNOME release fixes a stack of bugs and yet hardly any Linux users can get it without going through a messy tangle of operations…
>Why can’t I just double-click a file or two like in so many other OSes?
Because Gnome is a *platform*, not an “application”. By being a platform, it means that it has to integrate itself on each different distribution or Unix or X server, mostly the same way, but not always the same. Sometimes extra patches or changes have to be made for some of these distros or OSes. And this is why when it comes to platforms, you need to WAIT for your distro/OS to upgrade.
If you can’t wait, just compile it youself and lose the “warranty”. Or, switch to a development version of your distro. Or, switch to a distro that are “faster” to provide updates, like the Arch Linux updates earlier today.
Would it be cool if there was an API/ABI compatiblity as you wish? Sure it would be. But it is not, and it ain’t gonna happen. “Choice” is at the same time a gift and a curse in the Linux world.
Is there a gnu/linux distro that does clean seperation between base os and third party applications and platforms.
I’m using freebsd and have gnome 2.12.2 running as of this morning. The clean seperation of os and ports is what keeps me here. It’s nice to have the latest and greatest in the application world such as rhythmbox 9.2, firefox 1.5, gnome 2.12.1 while maintaing a stable os.
Arch isn’t the only Linux distribution that provides (what I interpret as your definition of) a clean separation between base OS and platform. Most will give you a choice of desktop platforms, and some boot for the first time in text-mode. Slackware and Rubix divide their packages into broad categories separating the base from the rest. Gentoo divides packages into a sort of two-tiered organization and provides a base package group. Even the big RPM distributions make it easy to install just a base operating system.
However, as a FreeBSD user, I would suggest you check out Arch. It is definitely the most FreeBSD-like of the Linux distributions.
Perhaps I should explain more. Freebsd is considered the os. It is completly seperate from anything third party. You can run the same OS with out upgrades while upgrading third party packages (ports) daily. This way I get the latest version’s of the software I use. My base OS does not change at all. Ports also all go in /usr/local/* while the base os goes in the normal locations.
Gentoo is I remember correctly sorta has the seperation I’m talking about. But emerge world still upgrades everthing, even base. And they still treat everthing like a whole instead of seperating out os/non os
>Gentoo is I remember correctly sorta has the seperation
>I’m talking about. But emerge world still upgrades
>everthing, even base. And they still treat everthing
>like a whole instead of seperating out os/non os
The only thing in Portage that is “the OS” would be kernel source packages. If you do a blind emerge update (like, emerge -uD world), which you should never do… it would in fact automatically pull down a new kernel source tree. But, this is just a source tree (another kernel in your /usr/src… it doesn’t even remove the old one, you do that by hand). Source does nothing, you’d have to go compile / copy the kernel over by hand to do any actual OS changing.
Thats the difference. If I do a blind portupgrade -ua “portage equavilent” then it will download and install everthing third party to freebsd. The base os uses different tools and is seperate.
Sorry if I’m not being real clear. If you have a spare machine try freebsd out if you have time. I’m certainly going to try arch.
Right, but I’m saying that all Gentoo does (in regards to the OS) is grabs some source. Nothing in the OS ever changes with an emerge, just like ports… emerge garbs “everything 3rd party to Gentoo” plus the new kernel source so you have it if you ever want to upgrade at your liesure.
Just so you know. Gentoo has by default a system and a world target. So emerge -uD system would only upgrade what you call the base system. The problem is that the world target implies system.
There are however a few tools floating around the gentoo forums that let you do world upgrades without touching system.
emwrap is one example, it even ads a third target for the development tool chain. emwrap -uDsw would thus upgrade base system + world but not touch the tool chain (compiler and stuff).
I have used Arch in the past and I must it is a very nice os, I used FreeBSD on my fileserver.
Both are definitly worth the install.
For my personal use, Arch is much more useful as a desktop then FreeBSD, however, BSD is still good.
Keep in mind, I don’t use Arch, I use something esle, but it is because I am very familiar with it and I know how to administrate my choosen distro very well.
my problem with freebsd (and gentoo for that matter) is that i dont like to sit and wait an hour to install totem with xine because there’s no binary available to install for it.
The just released gnome packages actually are not products but just components that are are more and more integral part of bigger systems.
As such they shouldn’t be advertised in separation because most people cannot easily reach them directly and a lot of precious excitement that could otherwise be directed to distros is wasted.
Unfortunately people are used to treat project milestone announcements on the same level as product announcements in commercial world.
Not to mention that GNOME supports non-Linux platforms…
But in any case, adding an APT repository doesn’t mean you need to accept any and all package upgrades offered by the new repo. Just grab what you need.
I haven’t used GARNOME or jhbuild in a while, but 2 years ago it wasn’t that difficult, and I imagine it hasn’t gotten any harder.
This doesn’t have anything to do will API/ABI/platform stability. If anything, you can’t get today’s version of GNOME on Ubuntu *because* of platform stability concerns. Distributors might need some time for building, testing, integrating, etc. Remember, the GNOME project releases source code, not binary packages for every distribution known to man. If you have to build it from source, then so does your distributor.
The only reason why “Linux” would need API or ABI stability is to accomodate binary, closed-source kernel modules. There is no end to the reasons why that is a bad idea.
This isn’t even really about choice, as Eugenia suggests. It’s about availability. GNOME 2.12.2 is available. The code is on the FTP servers. That’s how you get it. If you wait a couple days, maybe a couple weeks, someone will actually build the code for you, free of charge, possibly even out of the kindness of their heart alone.
So cut the entitlement crap and be thankful that we have free access to a desktop platform that could surely be assessed at untold millions of dollars in market capitalization.
No, if you switch to a ‘development’ repository and try to pull in just Gnome, it turns into a massive sprawl of invasive system upgrades, right down to GCC being upgraded. Lots and lots of testing versions all around.
Someone will build the code for me? Why should users have to wait for some random joe to build it for their specific distro? With API and ABI consistency, the GNOME project would be able to produce generic binaries that ran on all distros, so that EVERYONE could enjoy the GNOME bugfixes.
It’s nothing to do with ‘kernel modules’. It’s about giving people access to software in a clean, elegant and consistent way — like so many other OSes have sorted out over the years.
“The only reason why “Linux” would need API or ABI stability is to accomodate binary, closed-source kernel modules.”
Uhm, no. No no no no no. Have you never heard of third party OPEN SOURCE kernel modules? Take for example FUSE. It’s a royal pain in the *** to have to recompile it every time I upgrade my kernel. Or sysprof, the system-wide profiler. I shouldn’t have to recompile it every time I upgrade my kernel. Having a stable kernel API and ABI would hugely benefit the open source kernel modules.
What you’re talking about is one of the (many) problems with repository-based package managers. You could try slackware, which has a user-managed package system, where you get to decide what to upgrade when. I have a few scripts made up to manage/create packages from nautilus, which I can put online if you’d like.
what exactly do you mean by “user-managed package system”? i know about rpm and tarballs etc, but i’m wondering iof there’s is something that i’m not knowing about slackwear by your use of the term.
Presumeably he means that you, the user, are the one in control, rather than the package management-system, wrt what packages and what dependencies get installed or upgraded.
What you’re talking about is one of the (many) problems with repository-based package managers. You could try slackware, which has a user-managed package system, where you get to decide what to upgrade when. I have a few scripts made up to manage/create packages from nautilus, which I can put online if you’d like.
You have to write scripts to manage your packages, whereas repository-based package manager users don’t. I have not yet met a repository-based package manager that did not allow you to use it (via some force flags) as you would “installpkg”.
Slackware guys pound in over and over that they like having control over their system. For me, I like having a system I understand. I understand the slackware package management system thoroughly, and most of its users do.
A lot of those who understand it start to augment it with scripts. When i ran slackware (yes, i don’t much anymore) i was constantly cooking up scripts and programs of various complexity to augment my package management. In the end i decided to give some other distros a whirl, and really spend some time with their package management (at least 6 months), and found a comfortable niche elsewhere.
But the control slackware users talk about, its mostly “understanding”. The slackware package tools will almost never do something that isn’t easily explainable. If you understand a package management system thoroughly, though, you can use pretty much all of them to your liking.
As others have pointed out, Gnome really is a core part of the platform.
Can you imagine upgrading Explorer on Windows without a set of official patches from Microsoft?
This situation is (somewhat) similar. The vendor provides the Gnome with their customizations, and therefore they need to stabilize and provide the updates.
Good distributions are a little slow at doing this by design (eg, Gentoo still doesn’t have 2.12 in stable), in part because their 2.12.1 probably already has at least some patches from the 2.12.2 branch.
A little bit? As in six months to a year, depending on when the next _stable_ distro release is out?
If this was the other way round, and normal users had to wait six months on Windows for bugfixed free software releases, whereas Linux users could just double-click stuff as it arrives, you’d be mocking Microsoft ’til the cows come home.
Double standards indeed. Most other OSes have sorted this out, Linux hasn’t, so stop trying to squirm out of it…
“If this was the other way round, and normal users had to wait six months on Windows for bugfixed free software releases, whereas Linux users could just double-click stuff as it arrives, you’d be mocking Microsoft ’til the cows come home.”
Woah you are so far off the truth.
Currently Windows users have to wait closer to 6 years for major releases… well, I guess the service packs make it out once every couple of years.
Also, Gnome do maintainence releases (2.12.2 has been released already) every month or two.
Security patches are available instantly, since the development is open. A good distro has them integrated within a few hours at the most.
In the future, perhaps you should do some research before tirading about open source release processes.
“Currently Windows users have to wait closer to 6 years for major releases… well, I guess the service packs make it out once every couple of years.”
Er, I said bugfixed free software releases. Please read correctly before writing such a comment.
And it’s true. When a new free app comes out on Windows, users can just double-click and install.
With Linux, you have to wait six months (or a year) for it to be in your next stable distro release, or risk some ‘development’ repository, or scour the net for binaries that may not work with your specific distro, or compile the app (and all its dependencies) from source. A few projects have, wisely, adopted Autopackage to mitigate that, but for the most part it’s a horrible tangle.
I’d suggest looking around the net to see users struggling to get new software releases installed, and then tell me it’s not a hindrance to more widespread Linux desktop adoption…
Yer? Many bugfixes come about in the next version of Microsoft software. Windows Updates are only designed for security patches, apart from serious functionality problems. You may get a service pack if you’re lucky, but you have to wait for that or you may not get it at all.
I’d suggest looking around the net to see users struggling to get new software releases installed, and then tell me it’s not a hindrance to more widespread Linux desktop adoption…
I have to agree there – it is a problem. There are some things package repositories are good at, especially for providing update to your distribution, but you simply can’t install the wide variety of software there is out there through a package repository. Specific repositories also lock you into a particular distribution, or can be used to force you to upgrade when support is removed which doesn’t sit well with me or others.
I’d suggest looking around the net to see users struggling to get new software releases installed, and then tell me it’s not a hindrance to more widespread Linux desktop adoption…
Yes! I agree with you..!. Even if they manged to install, then they dont know how to run the program after that…( where to look and what is the file name to run!!..). Some people say that is lack of Linux knowldege.. Desktop user has to be a programmer?
I presume you are same anonymous who’s been hammering away on this same issue in 3 or 4 articles over the last few days? If so, I really can’t imagine what it is you hope to accomplish. It’s been explained to you why things are the way they are and, further, why they are highly unlikely change anytime in the near future. If you can’t reconcile yourself to that, then Linux quite obviously isn’t the best choice for you. By all means enjoy your Win and/or Mac computing experience, but please understand there are some of us who have found that the Linux way(s) of managing software packages better suits our needs. Not perfect, and certainly not without considerable room for improvement, but, on the whole, far better suited to our purposes.
“A little bit? As in six months to a year, depending on when the next _stable_ distro release is out? ”
Guess you should use a different distro then?
“If this was the other way round, and normal users had to wait six months on Windows for bugfixed free software releases, whereas Linux users could just double-click stuff as it arrives, you’d be mocking Microsoft ’til the cows come home. ”
That’s a bull comparison. I seem to have forgot, did MS give Windows95 users free upgrades to Windows98?
Does MS release major updates more often than 6 months?
I don’t see any major improvement in Gnome. It’s still ugly, colors are dull and there is this stupid foot. Also each time you click a folder inside another one, it opens new windows over and over again like pop ups (unless you use Nautilus). This makes me mad.
On a related note, while Nautilus/Roller extracts a broad assortment of archive formats, the right-click->create archive feature offers no selection of formats, defaulting to tar.gz. It would be nice if they added one more dropdown menu to that dialog for creating zip or tar.bz2 archives. I think I’ll go file that request…
I would like to see nautilus implement a nice search and filter interface. I’d like to be able to search within folders and also filter files within folders based their types. I’m surprised the Nautilus crew don’t find these functions crucial for a file manager.
There’s already a search tool called gnome-search-tool, and there should be a script floating around on the net that runs it from nautilus (it’s just a 2-line shell script). You can select files matching a pattern by going to edit->select pattern.
Last night I blew away by Gentoo/KDE install in favour of Ubuntu (mainly because of great Gnome integration).. So now, at least in the short term I am happy. But, I really have to think, when are we going to see the next big step for Gnome as a platform? At least with KDE, the porting effort to QT4 has got things rolling – but, will my beloved Gnome cope against KDE4, Aqua, (And Vista?) et al!?
what is it that you want??? its only the desktop environment and some utilities. i’m not quite sure what all the excitement is about, and i certainly don’t know why anyone would mess with an existing stable 2.12 installation (like ubuntu’s) to get and compile a point release that i am sure is visually INDISTINGUISHABLE from what was there before.
This is really why Linux needs some form of API, ABI and platform stability. This new GNOME release fixes a stack of bugs and yet hardly any Linux users can get it without going through a messy tangle of operations…
On FreeBSD only “portsnap fetch ; portsnap update ; portupgrade -a” for a minor GNOME release [2.12.0 => 2.12.2], for a major upgrade a script is provided [2.10.x => 2.12.0], pretty easy.
If you would like to see things changed, you are free to create a tool to do the job. 😉
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn’t possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it’s the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don’t want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view – they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what’s wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your “Menus & Toolbars” capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It’s a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don’t support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need one I know this too) share the same Toolbar object, if you change global settings then it automatically affect all applications (icons only, text under icons, drag handles etc.) the Toolbar object comes with an toolbar editor (to change icons, text under icons, draghandle, icon size etc.). This speaks about KDE’s great architecture which is pretty well designed.
Again this is just a small example to not make the understanding overwhelming complex. There are many other issues (architectual nature) inside GNOME and it goes on in many areas such as gnome-vfs (which is quite broken, there is no progress information when copying files from FTP (deep directory structures with many files), aborting is nearly impossible and so on (not to speak about many other modules, but FTP is the one I know best) like copying 0 byte files over and so on.
Basic stuff still in stable GNOME that don’t work reliable enough to get serious work done. People always come up with the same BS that GNOME is the light desktop, that it’s so great, clean and so on, that it’s the desktop to get work done. Evince crashing when selecting text, crashing on exit, gnome-print saving documents as *.ps files show other font or save corrupt data and and and.
But this is not the case to say the truth. As a former student of computer and economics science as well as I am now an IT-Project leader I depended on doing stuff for University such as drawing diagrams or UML stuff. I depended (since I was a hardcore GNOMER) on tools like DIA to try getting the work done. But DIA was a poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk (with lost hours of work). My university professor one day looked at me, and asked me whether I painted the use case diagram with a paint program. I told him that I was using DIA and I saw a smile on his face which he left uncommented afterwards.
Even printing doesn’t work reliable in DIA, nor does it work reliable enough in other applications. I had to search for alternatives and landed on KDE using Kivio and Umbrello. These apps surely aren’t the best apps existing, but they gave me more the feeling to get my work done. They worked, felt ok and the printout results was great. Not to mention that my learning curve was minimal since the apps reminded me quite a lot on commercial counterparts found on Microsoft Windows.
Like printing GIF images as black image (totally black paper printout), like not supporting printing more pages on one physical sheet (evince for example) and these things exists in gnome-print/ui and are an elementary thing of the stable gnome releases recently. I wanted to print a document with 120 pages in evince on 4 pages per 1 physical sheet, which should end up in 30 pages of paper. but after I came back from dinner I saw that evince printed it on 120 pages rather than 30 as I was assuming. These things can not be.
Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox. It’s quite frustrating and irritating to get dialogs all the time telling one that something is broken. same applies for the “get emails as soon as you start evolution” bug, specially if you use freemailers with timeout you keep stuck in getting dialogs all the time you start evolution telling one that it can not pop emails due to timeout of the mail isp.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
This argument is pointless with out specific examples. Gnome works fine for many users, including myself.
When looking at this legendary example picture
A common image used by yourself for trolling. But I’ll bite. EasyTag is an application that uses GTK, not a Gnome application. There is work underway to make it HIG compliant. AbiWord is a word processor and hence attempts to use the smaller toolbar layout common across all currently available competitors (on both linux and win32). The other windows are GEdit (a Gnome app) and Nautilus (a Gnome App). Note the similarity of button / toolbar size. Nautilus now defaults to spatial – hence no toolbar. The browser mode has configurable large / small icons. Finally, Evolution, another Gnome app (i.e. part of the platform) also uses the Gnome toolbar style. The dropdown on the New option is to mimic similar functionality used within Outlook, its main inspiration.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation
OO has nothing to do with it. That’s just FUD. If a library provides a Toolbar object (which GTK does) then any code can use it. Note you were previously discussing the problems of C. Here I see it as a benefit – ease of wrapper production. Note how many languages use wrappers around the core Gnome C libraries and happily make use of GTK.
poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk
Naturally you filed bugs on any problems you encountered, discussed them in forums, and dropped into irc to chat with the devs? No?
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ?
Sorry, had to quote that classic comment. Who judges about toolbars indeed….
Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
evolution-data-server, “About Me”, DBUS.
Look, I agree Gnome could do with some tinkering and improvement in many areas, but so could KDE. No DE is perfect, nor is one a better choice than another. I primarily use Gnome, but also have KDE around just to experience something different. I don’t understand why XFCE, IceWM, WM etc don’t get this sort of abuse from fanatics. This sort of attitude is pointless and a waste of your own time and others time. The energy spent copy and pasting that rant could have been much better spent contributing to your OSS project of choice.
Back on topic for the article, its good to see some minor improvements being made to Gnome 2.12. I’m looking forward to more of Frederico’s improvements making it into minor releases, as the numbers really add up. Congratulations on some great work to all involved.
“Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox…”
I use OpenSUSE and I must say the Evolution version there is the first Evolution version which really fullfills ALL my needs:
– Big local Maildir directory support which really works
– I can search through ALL my mail directories: IMAP and Maildir with the help of VFolders
– GPG signature/encryption is now nicely integrated
SUSE solved all the former problems with this version. I haven’t had trashed sync files etc. with this version although my local mailbox has 450 MByte.
You should really check out the new OpenSUSE which is the fastest distribution I have ever tested (SUPER optimized with pePr preloading).
And you can use Evolution under KDE without problems which I do now because KDE is so damn fast under OpenSUSE
Such things can not be in corporate desktops. If you really consider people and companies who spent a lot of money into their busiens to use GNOME then please make sure these issues don’t exist anymore.
Continuing with my work. As I said I am an IT-Project leader now and need to deal with projects these days. Again using Planner as the only existing GNOME Project management software I ended up in frustrations since Planner is more like a toy than a mature application. Again I had to switch over to KDE to use Task Juggler for this kind of activity, simply for the fact that Task Juggler came quite close to MS Project, offered a lot of features and is free to use.
Same applies in many other areas comparing GNOME with KDE (Rhythmbox vs. amaroK) and so on. We see how quickly KDE applications progress and become mature. Now with better C++ support and more developers and users KDE becomes better and better. The applications are miles ahead of what GNOME has to offer and basic functions like sound, printing, good looks, consistency, integration and interoperability simply works. Sure KDE is far from perfect but chosing between these two desktops KDE simply wins in all areas.
And that’s an important factor. Of course GNOME has the same choice to lead the desktops but sadly it hasn’t and I am not willing to wait years over years only to see GNOME making less steps forward.
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ? What is the ones disadvantage is the others pet feature. Some people say that KDE is overengineered but I say that GNOME peoples lost focus. I recall when SUN started doing the usability studies some years ago. It didn’t took long and the majority of people magically became all usability experts over night. And good applications became got turned nearly into a productivity barrier (if you ever happen to be productive with GNOME at all) I always find myself fiddlign around in things that simply don’t work. And I keep spending more hours in fixing the issues rather than start using the Desktop to get anything done. Always when you quickly need something you end up being lost on GNOME and its tools.
Another big issues is trying to contribute to GNOME.
Look, when I started to help out GNOME around 1999 or so I defiantely didn’t came and called the people “jerks”. This has been grown out over the long time of six years. I have never been treated like a piece of shit as I was when trying to help GNOME to help shape GNOME, to be part of it. But I had to deal with ignorants, hardheaded people, egoists and a lot of people who are incapable to work together with others.
Even if you as developer want to contribute to GNOME you are under permanent attack, you receive nothing else than huge diffamation, attacks, namecalling, slandering and so on. This drives people away from contributing to GNOME.
Most developers around GNOME are some sort of having found themselves in “groups” they usually block every contribution from outside and usually declare valid and good stuff as stupid, silly or as troll attempt. This is quite frustrating for people who want to contribute. The attempt to contribute something towards GNOME is a very stone way and usually leads to frustrations at the end.
The best thing for contributors is to do the dirt work. The leftovers which the GNOME developers don’t want to work on. Like writing documentations, doing the translations and so on. But as soon as it goes to normal bugfixes for bugs that are known for years these bugreports stay in bgo without attention. If you happen to have some time please head over to bgo and have a look on your own and you see how many bugs have been left there without attention. No comments, not even a feedback why the bug has been rejected or what was wrong with it.
Totally impossible is it as soon as you want to contribute some sort of features (because you reject working on the dirty leftovers or the simple patches that no one gives a f–k for). Working on features is usually the fun part of contributing. You are then directed to put your patches on bgo with comments like “we will have a look at that later” and then it stays there without any feedback for years. They are not interested to get new people helping that project.
Now I hope you may imagine why I don’t have very good words left for GNOME. Sure not everyone is guilty not everyone is an ass or behaves like that, but you need to take my apology that I stopped separating the good ones from the bad ones. I am seriously tired doing this.
Also really frustrating is the heavy abuse inside the GNOME community, those whom we as members have elected behave like patrons on their positions. A lot of my friends whom initially tried contributing to GNOME has been scared away due to bad practices and always repeated attacks (its like a dejavu now). Most normal people never heard about these kinds of practices or can’t imagine that this can really be happening – but sadly from my perspective this is the case.
Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave “GNOME GIRLS” he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren’t great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create “GNOME GIRLS” and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it’s roots and focus for users and users needs.
Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.
That’s why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.
KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It’s easier to build, it’s all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren’t really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.
KDE isn’t much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:
Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don’t need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it’s there.
Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It’s no real integration, just some “hack” which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?
I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.
I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don’t like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.
Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.
To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure bullshit in my opinion. Windows isn’t a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn’t been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don’t decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.
Gnome 2.x should stay stable and just keep many of the poor areas. It is more important with something that stay the same than something that makes things a bit bether.
Gnome 3.x should maybe be started around the time of gnome 2.14. Maybe the big suporters should shift their manpower to that goal, but they should also keep working on gnome 2.16 and keep gnome 2.x stable.
A stable gnome 2.x can lather live in coexistense with gnome 3.x as that new platform matures trough time. This wil give the users something predictable to use and let the weakneses of the platform be addressed at the same time. All major plattforms of some age needs some tweaks from time to time.
I do agree with you. I also hope that GNOME 3.x is being written mainly with MONO in mind to keep interoperability with other architectures such as Windows or OSX. To keep development simple, easy to maintain and to make bigger progress. Great programs such as F-Spot, Beagle, Muine, Tomboy and others are written in it. The applications look quite promising and the object oriented approach make it possible to do rapid application development.
Why vote would go for using MONO in the upcoming version of GNOME as much as possible and have it become a core part of the entire GNOME plattform. As it is now already since some of the tools such as F-Spot and Beagle are already part of the GNOME distribution.
There is no GNOME without MONO and no MONO without GNOME.
I do not have anything against the technology in mono, but I do fear Microsoft. Another posibility is for Sun to open up Java and use that as a fundation. Java and mono is mostly the same anyway.
The basic infrastructure should keep C or use c++. gcc have no problems with c++ anymore. Most likely not much use of going for c++ here.
Gnome should anyway keep focus on openness for different languages. Developers have different backgrounds and different choises.
There is no GNOME without MONO and no MONO without GNOME.
Yes, but there could there be GNOME without REDHAT since there’s no REDHAT with GNOME with MONO?
They’ve made their position clear, they won’t accept mono. They’ll work around it where they can (as they did with the OOo2 java dependencies to gcj), but they won’t accept it as a requirement.
Note, I’m not commenting on the relevancy of mono, I’m not a developer so can’t comment one way or the other, just pointing out the challenge Gnome may face balancing the requirements of their two biggest backers (RH and Novell). If Redhat ever pulled out of Gnome, it would be a blow to the organization.
> Yes, but there could there be GNOME without REDHAT since there’s no REDHAT with GNOME
> with MONO?
Yes there can. GNOME was a community project and probably still is. So whatever RedHat or any other Hat says is irrelevant.
> They’ve made their position clear, they won’t accept mono. They’ll work around it where
> they can (as they did with the OOo2 java dependencies to gcj), but they won’t accept it as
> a requirement.
Who are “They” ? Again GNOME is not owned by any company. It’s primarily community driven and the majority of the people who spent their time hacking on GNOME are using MONO for other project as well. If “They” whoever tey are don’t accept Mono then it’s their problem. GNOME is what the community is making out of it.
> balancing the requirements of their two biggest backers (RH and Novell).
Since when does Novell back GNOME ? Novell is up doing their own business and Novell also fired most of the GNOME people recently, this includes
a) nearly all Evolution hackers
b) nearly all Hula hackers
c) nearly all <forgot the name> hackers.
Backing GNOME up sounds the oposite to me.
> If Redhat ever pulled out of Gnome, it would be a blow to the organization.
They are not pulled out of GNOME, they have simply to go the way the developers move. If they can’t get hold of MONO then they can do whatever they want even fork GNOME if they prefer. But this won’t get them anywhere without the already present developers (who prefer MONO).
this is true and can be verified. the rumour put about that all the hula and evolution hackers got sacked was nothing more than a vicious rumour put about by a kde fanboy who had just got the sack from his kde job.
and only the gullible and the clueless such as IP 84.129.215 believed it and continue to believe it.
luckily for him, he wasn’t using konqueror. he would definitely be getting things done then – like coding for kde to get rid of all the bugs, to stop it crashing every 15 minites, to speed it up to even a snails pace, to stop it being a resource hog, and to make it at least semi-usable.
i’m not living in the dark ages at all, but some other people are. if you inspect 3.5 carefuly, you will see that konquerer hasn’t yet metamorphosed into something thats even semi-usable. same old same old.
Different people have different needs, apparently. With the 3.5 release, I was able to switch to Konqi from Firefox, and I don’t miss anything, while I gained speed and integration.
like coding for kde to get rid of all the bugs, to stop it crashing every 15 minites
Nope.
to speed it up to even a snails pace
If Konqueror is that slow, what the hell’s Nautilus?
to stop it being a resource hog
Resource hog how?
and to make it at least semi-usable.
Well, when I use a file manager I expect to be able to see a list of files and folders in something less than 20 seconds and I actually want to be able to copy large files.
Are you sure you’re not getting your file managers mixed up here?
“If Konqueror is that slow, what the hell’s Nautilus?”
considerably faster. but then you wouldn’t know because you’ve never used nautilus. or so your opinions of it show.
“Resource hog how?”
because its big, ugly, and bloated. what do you expect? a file manager that even makes my breakfast in the morning to be skimpy on resources? i think not. its also so tied in to other parts of kde that it brings down other applications too when it goes down(frequently)
“Well, when I use a file manager I expect to be able to see a list of files and folders in something less than 20 seconds and I actually want to be able to copy large files.
Are you sure you’re not getting your file managers mixed up here?”
i’m positively certain. see the comments made by kde’s own aaron krill on some of its problems.
> considerably faster. but then you wouldn’t know because you’ve never used nautilus.
> or so your opinions of it show.
Actually on my system (GNOME CVS) Nautilus is quite a lot slower than (KDE SVN) Konqueror.
> because its big, ugly, and bloated. what do you
> expect? a file manager that even makes my breakfast
> in the morning to be skimpy on resources? i think
> not. its also so tied in to other parts of kde that
> it brings down other applications too when it goes
> down(frequently)
I see the professionalism in your way of replying. Actually Konqueror can not be bloated since it’s nothing more than a Window around the kparts and kioslaves modell. The rest of your explaination only shows how retarded you are.
“I see the professionalism in your way of replying. Actually Konqueror can not be bloated since it’s nothing more than a Window around the kparts and kioslaves modell. The rest of your explaination only shows how retarded you are.”
haha and you’re not. i nearly choked on my lunch when i read the above. you, the person who lives in a fantasy world that he used to be a gnome developer and continually posts the same old rubbish on each and every thread about gnome showing his total and complete lack of understanding of gnome.
considerably faster. but then you wouldn’t know because you’ve never used nautilus. or so your opinions of it show.
Since you don’t know how slow Nautilus is, and that you’ve never used Konqueror and you’re stirring around for soundbites…..
because its big, ugly, and bloated.
The same old words again. So how is it a resource hog then? Do you have figures on memory usage, especially taking into account KDE and Konqueror reuse infinitely more code than anything in Gnome?
its also so tied in to other parts of kde that it brings down other applications too when it goes down(frequently)
It’s called reuse, it works, it doesn’t crash things at all and it’s something neither Nautilus or Gnome does. I don’t know how you know it crashed frequently when you obviously don’t use it……
see the comments made by kde’s own aaron krill on some of its problems.
They’re not the problems you’ve described by any stretch of the imagination. He’s talking about usability keeping Konqueror’s reuse but making more specific applications – web browser and file manager etc. I happen to agree with that. He’s not describing phantom crashes that don’t happen.
Wow, a short comment (at least that’s something) that doesn’t respond to anything. True to form. Your complete lack of a response speaks more volumes than anything you’ve written before.
Well I’ve never eevr’d anything, but have you ever heard the phrase ‘enough said’? ;-).
WHY DO YO KEEP ON REFUSING TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION THAT I’VE POSED TO YOU ON MANY OCCASSIONS WITHOUT A REPLY:
Q: YOU SLATE THE GNOME DESKTOP TIME AND TIME AGAIN WHILE CONSISTANTLY GETTING YOUR FACTS AND FIGURES WRONG ABOUT IT. THATS WHY NOBODY BELIEVES YOU THAT YOU HAVE EVER DEVELOPED FOR GNOME AS YOU CLAIM TO HAVE DONE. SO THAT PEOPLE KNOW WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM, WHAT WERE THE REASONS FOR YOU CHOOSING TO DEVELOP FOR GNOME RATHER THAN FOR KDE?
You’ll also find that he has developed many things that one couldn’t describe as roaring successes, which might explain his frustration.
P.S.: Oh, and though I understand you getting angry at him, writing in caps really is impolite and as you have seen, gives Ali a good way to ignore your question.
Running GNOME apps from XFCE works fine here. XFCE has a new filemanager (currently still under development) called “thunar” that’s a great light-weight alternative to nautilus. Every XFCE release now comes with a platform-independent installer, which means that it’s minimal fuss to install the latest XFCE on any *BSD or GNU/Linux distro as soon as it’s been released.
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn’t possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it’s the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don’t want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view – they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what’s wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your “Menus & Toolbars” capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It’s a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don’t support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need one I know this too) share the same Toolbar object, if you change global settings then it automatically affect all applications (icons only, text under icons, drag handles etc.) the Toolbar object comes with an toolbar editor (to change icons, text under icons, draghandle, icon size etc.). This speaks about KDE’s great architecture which is pretty well designed.
Again this is just a small example to not make the understanding overwhelming complex. There are many other issues (architectual nature) inside GNOME and it goes on in many areas such as gnome-vfs (which is quite broken, there is no progress information when copying files from FTP (deep directory structures with many files), aborting is nearly impossible and so on (not to speak about many other modules, but FTP is the one I know best) like copying 0 byte files over and so on.
Basic stuff still in stable GNOME that don’t work reliable enough to get serious work done. People always come up with the same BS that GNOME is the light desktop, that it’s so great, clean and so on, that it’s the desktop to get work done. Evince crashing when selecting text, crashing on exit, gnome-print saving documents as *.ps files show other font or save corrupt data and and and.
But this is not the case to say the truth. As a former student of computer and economics science as well as I am now an IT-Project leader I depended on doing stuff for University such as drawing diagrams or UML stuff. I depended (since I was a hardcore GNOMER) on tools like DIA to try getting the work done. But DIA was a poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk (with lost hours of work). My university professor one day looked at me, and asked me whether I painted the use case diagram with a paint program. I told him that I was using DIA and I saw a smile on his face which he left uncommented afterwards.
Even printing doesn’t work reliable in DIA, nor does it work reliable enough in other applications. I had to search for alternatives and landed on KDE using Kivio and Umbrello. These apps surely aren’t the best apps existing, but they gave me more the feeling to get my work done. They worked, felt ok and the printout results was great. Not to mention that my learning curve was minimal since the apps reminded me quite a lot on commercial counterparts found on Microsoft Windows.
Like printing GIF images as black image (totally black paper printout), like not supporting printing more pages on one physical sheet (evince for example) and these things exists in gnome-print/ui and are an elementary thing of the stable gnome releases recently. I wanted to print a document with 120 pages in evince on 4 pages per 1 physical sheet, which should end up in 30 pages of paper. but after I came back from dinner I saw that evince printed it on 120 pages rather than 30 as I was assuming. These things can not be.
Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox. It’s quite frustrating and irritating to get dialogs all the time telling one that something is broken. same applies for the “get emails as soon as you start evolution” bug, specially if you use freemailers with timeout you keep stuck in getting dialogs all the time you start evolution telling one that it can not pop emails due to timeout of the mail isp.
Such things can not be in corporate desktops. If you really consider people and companies who spent a lot of money into their busiens to use GNOME then please make sure these issues don’t exist anymore.
Continuing with my work. As I said I am an IT-Project leader now and need to deal with projects these days. Again using Planner as the only existing GNOME Project management software I ended up in frustrations since Planner is more like a toy than a mature application. Again I had to switch over to KDE to use Task Juggler for this kind of activity, simply for the fact that Task Juggler came quite close to MS Project, offered a lot of features and is free to use.
Same applies in many other areas comparing GNOME with KDE (Rhythmbox vs. amaroK) and so on. We see how quickly KDE applications progress and become mature. Now with better C++ support and more developers and users KDE becomes better and better. The applications are miles ahead of what GNOME has to offer and basic functions like sound, printing, good looks, consistency, integration and interoperability simply works. Sure KDE is far from perfect but chosing between these two desktops KDE simply wins in all areas.
And that’s an important factor. Of course GNOME has the same choice to lead the desktops but sadly it hasn’t and I am not willing to wait years over years only to see GNOME making less steps forward.
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ? What is the ones disadvantage is the others pet feature. Some people say that KDE is overengineered but I say that GNOME peoples lost focus. I recall when SUN started doing the usability studies some years ago. It didn’t took long and the majority of people magically became all usability experts over night. And good applications became got turned nearly into a productivity barrier (if you ever happen to be productive with GNOME at all) I always find myself fiddlign around in things that simply don’t work. And I keep spending more hours in fixing the issues rather than start using the Desktop to get anything done. Always when you quickly need something you end up being lost on GNOME and its tools.
Another big issues is trying to contribute to GNOME.
Look, when I started to help out GNOME around 1999 or so I defiantely didn’t came and called the people “jerks”. This has been grown out over the long time of six years. I have never been treated like a piece of shit as I was when trying to help GNOME to help shape GNOME, to be part of it. But I had to deal with ignorants, hardheaded people, egoists and a lot of people who are incapable to work together with others.
Even if you as developer want to contribute to GNOME you are under permanent attack, you receive nothing else than huge diffamation, attacks, namecalling, slandering and so on. This drives people away from contributing to GNOME.
Most developers around GNOME are some sort of having found themselves in “groups” they usually block every contribution from outside and usually declare valid and good stuff as stupid, silly or as troll attempt. This is quite frustrating for people who want to contribute. The attempt to contribute something towards GNOME is a very stone way and usually leads to frustrations at the end.
The best thing for contributors is to do the dirt work. The leftovers which the GNOME developers don’t want to work on. Like writing documentations, doing the translations and so on. But as soon as it goes to normal bugfixes for bugs that are known for years these bugreports stay in bgo without attention. If you happen to have some time please head over to bgo and have a look on your own and you see how many bugs have been left there without attention. No comments, not even a feedback why the bug has been rejected or what was wrong with it.
Totally impossible is it as soon as you want to contribute some sort of features (because you reject working on the dirty leftovers or the simple patches that no one gives a f–k for). Working on features is usually the fun part of contributing. You are then directed to put your patches on bgo with comments like “we will have a look at that later” and then it stays there without any feedback for years. They are not interested to get new people helping that project.
Now I hope you may imagine why I don’t have very good words left for GNOME. Sure not everyone is guilty not everyone is an ass or behaves like that, but you need to take my apology that I stopped separating the good ones from the bad ones. I am seriously tired doing this.
Also really frustrating is the heavy abuse inside the GNOME community, those whom we as members have elected behave like patrons on their positions. A lot of my friends whom initially tried contributing to GNOME has been scared away due to bad practices and always repeated attacks (its like a dejavu now). Most normal people never heard about these kinds of practices or can’t imagine that this can really be happening – but sadly from my perspective this is the case.
Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave “GNOME GIRLS” he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren’t great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create “GNOME GIRLS” and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it’s roots and focus for users and users needs.
Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.
That’s why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.
KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It’s easier to build, it’s all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren’t really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.
KDE isn’t much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:
Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don’t need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it’s there.
Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It’s no real integration, just some “hack” which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?
I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.
I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don’t like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.
Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.
To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure bullshit in my opinion. Windows isn’t a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn’t been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don’t decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn’t possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it’s the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don’t want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view – they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what’s wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your “Menus & Toolbars” capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It’s a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don’t support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need one I know this too) share the same Toolbar object, if you change global settings then it automatically affect all applications (icons only, text under icons, drag handles etc.) the Toolbar object comes with an toolbar editor (to change icons, text under icons, draghandle, icon size etc.). This speaks about KDE’s great architecture which is pretty well designed.
Again this is just a small example to not make the understanding overwhelming complex. There are many other issues (architectual nature) inside GNOME and it goes on in many areas such as gnome-vfs (which is quite broken, there is no progress information when copying files from FTP (deep directory structures with many files), aborting is nearly impossible and so on (not to speak about many other modules, but FTP is the one I know best) like copying 0 byte files over and so on.
Basic stuff still in stable GNOME that don’t work reliable enough to get serious work done. People always come up with the same BS that GNOME is the light desktop, that it’s so great, clean and so on, that it’s the desktop to get work done. Evince crashing when selecting text, crashing on exit, gnome-print saving documents as *.ps files show other font or save corrupt data and and and.
But this is not the case to say the truth. As a former student of computer and economics science as well as I am now an IT-Project leader I depended on doing stuff for University such as drawing diagrams or UML stuff. I depended (since I was a hardcore GNOMER) on tools like DIA to try getting the work done. But DIA was a poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk (with lost hours of work). My university professor one day looked at me, and asked me whether I painted the use case diagram with a paint program. I told him that I was using DIA and I saw a smile on his face which he left uncommented afterwards.
Even printing doesn’t work reliable in DIA, nor does it work reliable enough in other applications. I had to search for alternatives and landed on KDE using Kivio and Umbrello. These apps surely aren’t the best apps existing, but they gave me more the feeling to get my work done. They worked, felt ok and the printout results was great. Not to mention that my learning curve was minimal since the apps reminded me quite a lot on commercial counterparts found on Microsoft Windows.
Like printing GIF images as black image (totally black paper printout), like not supporting printing more pages on one physical sheet (evince for example) and these things exists in gnome-print/ui and are an elementary thing of the stable gnome releases recently. I wanted to print a document with 120 pages in evince on 4 pages per 1 physical sheet, which should end up in 30 pages of paper. but after I came back from dinner I saw that evince printed it on 120 pages rather than 30 as I was assuming. These things can not be.
Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox. It’s quite frustrating and irritating to get dialogs all the time telling one that something is broken. same applies for the “get emails as soon as you start evolution” bug, specially if you use freemailers with timeout you keep stuck in getting dialogs all the time you start evolution telling one that it can not pop emails due to timeout of the mail isp.
Such things can not be in corporate desktops. If you really consider people and companies who spent a lot of money into their busiens to use GNOME then please make sure these issues don’t exist anymore.
Continuing with my work. As I said I am an IT-Project leader now and need to deal with projects these days. Again using Planner as the only existing GNOME Project management software I ended up in frustrations since Planner is more like a toy than a mature application. Again I had to switch over to KDE to use Task Juggler for this kind of activity, simply for the fact that Task Juggler came quite close to MS Project, offered a lot of features and is free to use.
Same applies in many other areas comparing GNOME with KDE (Rhythmbox vs. amaroK) and so on. We see how quickly KDE applications progress and become mature. Now with better C++ support and more developers and users KDE becomes better and better. The applications are miles ahead of what GNOME has to offer and basic functions like sound, printing, good looks, consistency, integration and interoperability simply works. Sure KDE is far from perfect but chosing between these two desktops KDE simply wins in all areas.
And that’s an important factor. Of course GNOME has the same choice to lead the desktops but sadly it hasn’t and I am not willing to wait years over years only to see GNOME making less steps forward.
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ? What is the ones disadvantage is the others pet feature. Some people say that KDE is overengineered but I say that GNOME peoples lost focus. I recall when SUN started doing the usability studies some years ago. It didn’t took long and the majority of people magically became all usability experts over night. And good applications became got turned nearly into a productivity barrier (if you ever happen to be productive with GNOME at all) I always find myself fiddlign around in things that simply don’t work. And I keep spending more hours in fixing the issues rather than start using the Desktop to get anything done. Always when you quickly need something you end up being lost on GNOME and its tools.
Another big issues is trying to contribute to GNOME.
Look, when I started to help out GNOME around 1999 or so I defiantely didn’t came and called the people “jerks”. This has been grown out over the long time of six years. I have never been treated like a piece of shit as I was when trying to help GNOME to help shape GNOME, to be part of it. But I had to deal with ignorants, hardheaded people, egoists and a lot of people who are incapable to work together with others.
Even if you as developer want to contribute to GNOME you are under permanent attack, you receive nothing else than huge diffamation, attacks, namecalling, slandering and so on. This drives people away from contributing to GNOME.
Most developers around GNOME are some sort of having found themselves in “groups” they usually block every contribution from outside and usually declare valid and good stuff as stupid, silly or as troll attempt. This is quite frustrating for people who want to contribute. The attempt to contribute something towards GNOME is a very stone way and usually leads to frustrations at the end.
The best thing for contributors is to do the dirt work. The leftovers which the GNOME developers don’t want to work on. Like writing documentations, doing the translations and so on. But as soon as it goes to normal bugfixes for bugs that are known for years these bugreports stay in bgo without attention. If you happen to have some time please head over to bgo and have a look on your own and you see how many bugs have been left there without attention. No comments, not even a feedback why the bug has been rejected or what was wrong with it.
Totally impossible is it as soon as you want to contribute some sort of features (because you reject working on the dirty leftovers or the simple patches that no one gives a f–k for). Working on features is usually the fun part of contributing. You are then directed to put your patches on bgo with comments like “we will have a look at that later” and then it stays there without any feedback for years. They are not interested to get new people helping that project.
Now I hope you may imagine why I don’t have very good words left for GNOME. Sure not everyone is guilty not everyone is an ass or behaves like that, but you need to take my apology that I stopped separating the good ones from the bad ones. I am seriously tired doing this.
Also really frustrating is the heavy abuse inside the GNOME community, those whom we as members have elected behave like patrons on their positions. A lot of my friends whom initially tried contributing to GNOME has been scared away due to bad practices and always repeated attacks (its like a dejavu now). Most normal people never heard about these kinds of practices or can’t imagine that this can really be happening – but sadly from my perspective this is the case.
Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave “GNOME GIRLS” he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren’t great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create “GNOME GIRLS” and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it’s roots and focus for users and users needs.
Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.
That’s why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.
KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It’s easier to build, it’s all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren’t really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.
KDE isn’t much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:
Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don’t need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it’s there.
Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It’s no real integration, just some “hack” which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?
I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.
I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don’t like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.
Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.
To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure bullshit in my opinion. Windows isn’t a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn’t been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don’t decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.
I guess you spent some time writing up those 3 big pieces, and you probably like to use it in a way so you feel you get something back for the invested time. But can you please stop re-posting it over and over again, it’s quite annoying.
Even if it sometimes are ontopic and for the most part seems correct, and should not originally have been modded down. That time is past, now it’s nothing more than some annoying canned response or spam. If you really feel the need to reuse the text in discussions here, limit yourself to smaller pieces of it. And only when relevant, please.
I am not responsible for the dummy account reposts. So beware! I reposted the other ones using my IP (as it’s verificable) due to the fact that the initial posts used to be moderated +4 (all three of them) and that lasted for some hours until someone with his fake accounts moderated them down to -4 or so.
GNOME is an awfully broken architecture (which is one part of what I critizise) it also has a bad community of mainly slandering and evil people.
To understand GNOME, you need to split GNOME into two parts. First the part that makes the desktop (which we know good enough doesn’t work good enough to be ready for production) and the second part which (as I mentioned a dozen comments earlier) is full of really insulting people.
If you contribute to GNOME then you are a good person (while there are still people disrespecting your contributions where envy and nepothism is on the daily schedule).
I was told that if I dislike GNOME then I should file in bugreports (as proven above) and then I was told to talk with the developers about the stuff that doesn’t work. You can be sure that in all the years I have tried to do this thing but all I earned was the same ignorance that people have shown here.
a) They talk all the critics to death
b) Or they go the dead friendly way, so friendly that it’s not normal anymore. A wrong thing fo friendlyness in the replies which of course ends immediately after that which wasn’t meant to be serious reply at all only demonstrating that they are no jackasses while replying to you.
c) Critics are usually talked to death by giving dozens of replies to you without any offer for solutions or replies without much value.
d) Those who get elected from the foundation members into the board are usually abusing their powers to diffamate other contributors, who permanently violate the foundation charter’s rules.
e) A bunch of GNOME developers have scared away a lot of fine contributors to the GNOME architecture such as Star (long time artist for GNOME), Dr. Frickle (who initially maintained the old GNOME pages), Mr. Baulig (the guy who initially worked his ass off on libgnome/ui and other parts) and many others.
The GNOME crowd can’t live with critics, they can’t professionally deal with critics and not that they can’t deal with critics, they also need to totally kill off those who criticise. That’s why GNOME makes no real progress, that’s why the majority of stuff feels so broken. Because it’s impossible to set through changes inside GNOME, first of all changes of the foundation board, of the release team and other parts of GNOME because it’s always set by the same people. You can’t have anything changed and thus GNOME is full of stuff that is totally horrible – under control of companies like RedHat and Novell.
Not long ago a good friend of the german GNOME community team had the idea (together with his girlfriend) to open “Gnome Girls” the domain was bought the idea was brought up in the GNOME camp and he was pissed off for this because the GNOME people said that the idea sucked, that it was a bda idea and that something like this was not wanted.
A few months later a few girls who work for RedHat have shown up the scene (no one heard of them before) and they wanted to open (yes you guessed) “Gnome Girls” and something must have happened, it’s like a switch you must have turned in the heads of these people. In no time it was a great idea, the best idea that existsted and they got immediately support. Web space has been given, access to CVS has been given and all the other requirements within hours.
Same for the ordinary user, someone who asks for CVS access or for a mailinglist, webspace etc. will be placed on schedule or simply the request is ignored (as usually) but as soon as a new company joins the GNOME scene the resources are given instantly. The people who give all the resources are so what euphoric, they even blow more sugar in the ass of those companies who join that you need to ask yourself how they could hold all that sugar without getting a shock.
Some newcomer to GNOME asked in the channel, what he has to do to get his contributions accepted as part of GNOME. Now from my personal experience over the years I know that the answer must have been – No chance!. I queried him and told him that he probably had no chance that his contributions get accepted by GNOME. I told him a bit of my personal experiences over the years and how rude and egoistic GNOME developers are and that most of the stuff which makes GNOME today are nepothism software written by their own people. They keep ignoring other stuff even if it’s better software. That’s some sort of selfmarketing they do rather than creating a working desktop.
I am also a bit fedup about all the companies that have recently joined the GNOME foundation board. How comes that every company who shows interest in GNOME shows up as member of the GNOME foundation board ? Hell, every little small user who contributes to GNOME needs to pass the membership application, months passes, you get asked dozen of questions what you have done and then you might be lucky to get accepted (happened for me but I resigned from my foundation membership due to heavy abuse). But how comes all these new companies join in as if they were part of GNOME for the past 6 years or longer ?
GNOME, software only for the users ? Or GNOME, software for directmarketing and cash ? How illusionary!
I’ve not heard so much ranting and moaing since watch dog where they PAY for there products. It amazes me how you people moan so much about GNOME when it’s free, does anyone throw it down your throat and force you to use it?, NO.
Did you buy GNOME with a warrantee and not happy with your product?, NO. I truly think that KDE users and devs are positioning themselfs to claim KDE is the only true one DE for Linux. Even the GNOME devs congratulate KDE and a good job (see planet gnome blogs), now thats friendly. KDE’s lead developer likes to poke fun at GNOME. For thoese of you how think KDE is a more friendly community need to wake up. KDE users just keep poking fun at GNOME to make there own DE look better, even Windows users are friendlier and dont attack it half as much as KDE users.
What makes it worse is that KDE users have gone into overdrive since KDE4 showed up claiming it’s the next best thing to Vista, then after Oxygen icons showed up they attack the Tango project. If you people want to destroy something, try Windows or OS-X, or are they targets you just cannot compete with!
GNOME would suck less if the ground architecture would simply work. That basic things like windows, toolbars, menus would be done in ONE WAY rather than 20 different ways, that tools like Glade should be re-invented properly and not this poor thing that people keep designing their dialogs with and where properties inside the *.glade files are set inproperly and wrong. GNOME would also suck less if it had a global plugins system such as Kioslave or KParts. Bonobo is so what complex that no real documents exists. So instead writing plugins or snapins so other apps inside GNOME can use it. People keep writing new libraries and make all the apps depend on these libraries because its the easier solution for them to solve this task. A plugins pool where apps could grab a working object and register it with their programs would have been a better choice imo.
True that and thanks for following my comments all the years. It’s good to see hat people keep track of what I write and I still stand behind of the things that I wrote. Be it in the past or in the present. But I would have appreciated if you would write your own stuff and your own opinion regarding GNOME and not use other peoples comments to profilate as you’ve been doing atm. It’s easily verificable by the OSN staff who wrote what and that I am not responsible for the dummy_account reposts. So please, if you have something to contribute, be it valid criticism or even if it’s a rant. Do your own shit.
Sorry dude but you need serious help. But even this worse situation has a good side. A side that I want to make use for the positive. You’ve given a good example of what’s wrong with the GNOME community. Thanks for proving this and thanks for proving that at least this part of the lengthy feedback above is correct. It’s up to the people here to decide whom to believe more. Who wants to be working his ass off for people like you ? Cheers!
Some further words about GNOME and why I think it’s so damn broken and why I believe that contributions alone don’t solve the issues.
The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.
Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.
Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn’t touched for a really long time. There wasn’t even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.
But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it’s quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.
Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like “specifications” as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it’s a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature – and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.
For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say /opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can’t move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.
Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it’s path inside GNOME but still it doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.
Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on ‘dead ideas’ they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get’s lost with playground stuff.
We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.
It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don’t care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.
GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.
Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can’t be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.
It’s also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whole document correctly with correct fonts but as soon as I start printing one page out of it messes the fonts totally up (looks like monotype fonts when printed).
It’s the release team to take care of what they include inside GNOME, if the stuff is still immature or not working properly then it should by all means be avoided for inclusion since it doesn’t help anyone. GNOME is often claimed to be the desktop to get work done. But I often find myself to do more work in fixing stuff around GNOME rather than getting work done. Printing job applications usually ends the way that I switch into console and print over ghostscript using cups rather than trusting gnome-print or evince (which fault this is I don’t know but a confirmed bugreport exists).
As a corporate desktop I urgently require reliable tools and I require these tools today and not – one day. Look DIA, Nautilus, Evolution and many other tools exists for years now and DIA is nowhere to be usable and I often tried giving them a helping hand which I got ugly repsonses from the maintainers.
This does help the corporate idea how ? In no ways does this help anything. I do find the “Tango Project” and “Better Desktop” to be a nice thing but I somehow got the feeling that it’s just a reaction towards the plasma project that KDE offers.
Unfortunately in my opinion the KDE people do make a better figure with what they announce because most of the stuff they do works. Sure, not perfectly and sometimes you have quirks and other issues inside KDE as well but the tools exists to get work done. You don’t need to think about does it print correctly. It simply does. You don’t need to worry about Kivio or Umbrella not working correctly they simply do make a better shape than DIA for example.
KDE may look overwhelming complex and overloaded in the eyes of inexperienced people but in other peoples minds it looks just right and offers all the stuff one really needs without worrying.
I don’t say that these things won’t show up for GNOME one day but I can tell you from personal experiences that developing for GNOME is a nightmare.
As initially said you can easily move a final compiled KDE binary system from one dir to another and have the stuff work perfectly and perfectly find the datafiles. GNOME doesn’t offer that.
Maybe they should start by banning you ? Who knows maybe dummy_account is you ? People like you make me sick and it only proves what the lengthy three part comments proves. The GNOME crowd is full of freaking and really insulting people.
Namecalling == true
Insulting == true
Not able to accept critics == true
Not able to deliver a working Desktop == true
<add other stuff here> == true.
Go and contact the OSN staff and have them verify the IP’s used.
Well it’s a GNOME thread, the KDE crowd are here trolling, after all why do we get this in every GNOME thread or news thread.
Talk about name calling, the GNOME crowd can do that because it’s a GNOME thread. So why dont you STFU and go do something else with your sad life. It also seems that GNOME is more of a threat to KDE then i’d realized, funny how KDE users cannot point out good points instead just mod down every positive GNOME post.
Anonymous posting should be banned, then maybe we will get some proper discussion done around here.
You are the one that is trolling Ali. If you hate Gnome so much just stop posting here. Just leave us alone and stop with all these posts. Your not accomplishing anything!
FYI and to everyone else. I just dropped Eugenia an email a few seconds ago about the mess caused here and hope she’s going to nuke that dummy_ass account and the guy behind it. Regardless of the comments as for the time being.
> If you hate Gnome so much just stop posting here.
> Just leave us alone and stop with all these posts.
Who are you telling others where to post and where not. Wasn’t open source all about free speach and having an own opinion ?
Ali: you claim GNOME devs are insulting, namecall, not able accept criticism, yet here you are portraying all the same traits you accuse us of having.
Maybe the reason you’ve found GNOME devs react so negatively toward you is because you’ve been insulting toward them even after they’ve tried to work with you to address issues you’ve borught up (in mean and nasty ways).
Stop being such an ass and start treating GNOME devs as human beings if you want to be treated that way.
We all try to do our best, but we can only take so much before we start ignoring you (which you like to portray as us insulting you, namecalling, etc).
You also need to stop with your know-it-all attitude which many of us find insulting and makes it impossible to work with you to solve your issues.
Oh stop playing the nice boy here. How come you read comments about unhappy people everywhere who made the same or similar experiences with the GNOME devteam ? Your reaction is quite laughable and I truly don’t believe that your writing was meant to be honest. Maybe you are an exception from the others, maybe not but I can’t validate this. GNOME has always been quite offensive and rude to their userbase as well to those who tried contributing and this has to be said in the public so people understand it. You people keep pulling all the dirt under the carpet to keep the “white shiny world” around GNOME intact, while in reality it’s not that great as you want to make it sound. Not to speak about the insane marketing practices around GNOME.
You know who he was/is yes ? And you probably also know what he did for GNOME yes ?
You also happen to know who people like Star (one of the core artists around GNOME during the 1.x to 2.x transition) or Dr. Frickle (IBM guy who happened to maintain some GNOME pages) were ?
The same way you worked together with Eugenia who came up with very good and reasonable proposals ? Hey she’s even more calm than I’m and yet you had big issues dealing with a girl.
Hey it was all plasterd over even on the GNOME mailing lists. Well we and probably a lot more are all not matching the GNOME communitys scheme of possible contributors. And we all have social problems that we need to solve.
I also don’t see anything wrong with my initial 3 comments comment (I had to split it due to limitation). Surely I can be blamed to have it cut&pasted over from 1 or 2 other OSN articles before but then it still matches and still is a highly valid comment with many valid reasons and points inside. It had a reason why people spent +4 voting points on ALL THREE comments. It lasted for a couple of hours, got slightly modded down and then up again which is a proof that the so called “rant” is not really a rant but more speaking out of the hearts of people. The reason why specially “my comment” is treated with more care than others is the fact that I am more or less a Renegade who had perfect insight inside GNOME (it had a reason why I hang out in the GNOME irc channels for years) day in, day out.
I saw a lot of people with “social problems” (as you might say) joining the channels, being scared away and never have shown up again, so I perfectly know what’s going on. That’s something you people feel scared. If I was that regular f–king troll you want to make out of me then why do you people spent so much attention specially for my person and specially for my comments (which then within seconds got moderated down to -4 – which is quite questionable).
People who quickly moderate down something usually have something big to hide, they probably dislike the context or feel personal insulted or simply can’t stand constructive critics. That was always a big problem within GNOME. The high egos of developers who play the heroes of open source who can’t really deal with critics. Well as you can read on the blogs they always hype themselves up in high skies but critics, dare who does that.
“I’m very disappointed with the lack of communication within this project.
[…]
Perhaps KDE is not the right project for these people and they should consider working on something which they can do on their own. Appearantly not everyone is able to cooperate in a group.
Way to go, Ali! Show those those idiots at gnome how to keep a community full of friends, puppies, rainbows and green, vast meadows.
I’m sure that after five years continously trolling the project you’ll get to it. Or perhaps you’ll have wasted lots of time just to be remembered as the quintessential troll. Who knows.
Oh come on, it’s quite easy digging up a handful of not really good emails out of the thousands that were written. And it’s not deal making someone look like an ass if you provide only those links that help you achieving that goal – by showing just the negative ones. The amount of good vs. bad emails are in no way compareable or have the same weight.
Look closer to the mailinglists that you provide and you see other people writing similar stuff. Besides that here is the correct LibXML2 comment I made and not the one cut out of context which you happen to have post.
And it would probably be an easy thing to dig up the same amount of crap if I knew your name. But then it’s not required if you simply look down the archives of said gnome lists which going back to 1998 or so you find a lot of similar mails and treats written by others.
The point is that even some others here and on other places have reported similar bad experiences with people involved into GNOME, they got sick of it and left. It’s easy to blame the big mistakes and failures of GNOME towards others – and I seriously wonder why for my person there is more attention being given than if someone else writes a comment or opinion about GNOME. I don’t see the difference between someone else saying “gnome sucks” and me saying “gnome sucks” with only the one exception that everyone comes up here whenever I do and only dump down the entire shit towards me.
A bit curious this is but then it’s no wonder that I have and made the same experiences than others. Why don’t you people go and have a conversation with the people mentioned above ? Through the conversations with then you see a lot of similarities and parallels and similar treats to what the handful of people are doing here.
It’s easy to totally crap out someones name because (as you might remember) most GNOME developers have found themselves into “groups” they grouped together to fight exactly all attacks, critics, contructive feedback. They act like gods where they sit and they think they are right and the only correct people outside. It’s clear that when someone criticises GNOME that within a few mins or hours exactly that bunch of developers show up making it look like you are the ass and the cause for everything.
The huge success of KDE here is their community and the different philosophy and their great people. How comes I don’t have these problems with KDE ? How comes nearly everyone treatens me with respect there, we do have good conversations, yes we sometimes even disagree but the entire thing is totally different.
And why ?
Because KDE is successful, it has achieved all the stuff that GNOME is still trying to catch up with. KDE is there and even ahead of what GNOME is talking for – for years. KDE offers the applications that GNOME barely can deliver, KDE offers the solution for enterprise.
How comes that in the KDE thread below (the 3.5 announce) all the GNOME people jumped in and made a hell fest out of it (with a few exceptions who said thank you) everyone else came up with the same old junk like bloat, resource hog, qt license or other stuff. But as soon as someone starts some well defined and valid critics of the GNOME plattform then something totally ticks off in the head of GNOME people and they start using absolutely inacceptable methods only to get rid of those who reported them.
It’s not just fun anymore, it’s insanity. And the ones who clearly deserve visiting a psychatry are those who believe that GNOME already surpassed OSX and Windows. The Open Source movement don’t need such people. Open Source always was about fun, about freedom of speech (Freesoftware), about a culture. Not about marketing, not about competition with Microsoft or Apple – not about having companies keeping a thumb up on something and not about playing some jackass.
Sorry my friends, you can continue blaming all your incapabilities towards one person – me! but said that you are not showing a very good show towards the others. Assuming I am that big ass you want to make out of me, your current behavior and demonstration don’t make you look any different and you only prove that the lengthy comments:
Are valid and correct. And regarding that dummy_account asshole. I know it wasn’t me and the OSN staff luckely knows that too.
Not just that, but these tricks are the common methods and dirty under the belt hitting tricks from the GNOME crowd to get rid of people. Instead of giving a constructive feedback they go back use these methods.
You people are quite poor and you should shame about that – but then I only wish and hope that my informations for the people interested might pay off one day. I don’t tell them to not use GNOME but I hope they understand a bit better what’s up with you people. I wrote this stuff from my own experiences made and my own experiences are that there is a big difference between KDE and GNOME not just architecture, but also culture and community.
Funny, the only one comes across as being vindicative and defensive is you.
All you keep doing is repeating the same ole spiel about how nasty and uncooperative the GNOME people are (nice generalization, btw) without providing any shred of evidence. If GNOME is indeed as bad a community as you say obviously it would have completely imploded a long time ago but it hasnt.
The only diffence between someone else saying “gnome sucks” and you saying “gnome sucks” is that you write much longer and more boring tirades.
GNOME use dirty tricks, blah blah blah, they’re all attacking and not accepting feedback, blah blah blah, gnome sucks, blah blah blah, KDE rocks, blah blah blah, KDE is much better at X, blah blah blah.
Get yourself a life and stop this endless whining.
Your arguments are quite wrong and lack a fundamental thing. Till now we only heard stuff like “he is a troll”, “he should visit a doctor”, “he should consult a psychatrist” and permanent moderating down of my comments that initially were all moderated up and basicly got good feedback and didn’t harmed anyone.
The mess started as soon as some of you jumped in making the mess out of it that we see now – before that the entire conversation (up to the first 70 comments or so) was quite ok.
All you did was throwing out accusations like the ones above in my quotes or moderating valid and good comments down. None of you spent the time actually giving constructive feedback, why they got moderated down, what the context was that made you comment them down or even give a constructive feedback showing where the comments were wrong or whatever would be correct and mature to demonstrate a good conversation.
I still can’t see anything wrong with the lengthy comments and none so far complained about them or proven them wrong. Just because it’s so nice on OSNews.com to moderate everything and everyone down doesn’t make the context or comment that got moderated down less valid or false. Just because some of you come up here repeating the quoted nonsense over and over again still doesn’t make it valid or true.
Why don’t you start saying what’s wrong ? Until now all you did was diffamating a person and nothing else. No word, no single complaint of what was written. Can I and the others assume that the context then is correct ? Can we say the stuff found inside is true ? It must be the case otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to hide, nothing for the GNOME people to feel ashamed about. You also kept ignoring where I post about the other people you scared away.
GNOME didn’t imploded. But GNOME stagnated and for me there is no real difference actually. Where is GNOME today ? It can’t stand competition with KDE not even with XFCE anymore (hey XFCE offers yet a better FM than GNOME does). You people sit in the IRC channels hyping each others up to the skies, chocking each others tail and live in the illusionary world that you are the dominating species on open source who offer such a great desktop. The reality is, everyone is bored, no one is trusting the others and everyone expects to be hired by SUN, NOVELL, REDHAT for the poor stuff they supported. Where is GNOME today where it wasn’t 2 years ago ? Dozens of small fixes and simple version bumps, basic stuff still not working properly etc.
The only thing that keeps GNOME still gnoming, is the fact of the agressive Marketing that you people are doing. A Marketing that includes direct attack of KDE – since there are no ground breaking other comments you can give. New people join, from the old developer only 1/3 have remained, others simply disappeared one by one and some new people have taken their place but there is no real progress.
So care to explain why you shift your own failures of the GNOME project towards me ? I only speak out my mind about GNOME and I don’t need to justify to you or anyone else why I do. It’s your freedom to visit OSNews.com or not.
“You people sit in the IRC channels hyping each others up to the skies, chocking each others tail and live in the illusionary world that you are the dominating species on open source who offer such a great desktop.”
I dont use IRC and I dont use GNOME much, actually. I use ROX.
However, when I do use GNOME I find nothing to really complain about. Same goes for KDE. They’re both good
“(Hey XFCE offers yet a better FM than GNOME does)”
Uh, no. XFFM is horrible and I just cant stand the CDE-ishness of XFCE (but that’s just a personal preference).
“You also kept ignoring where I post about the other people you scared away. ”
What on earth are you talking about?
“So care to explain why you shift your own failures of the GNOME project towards me ?”
Since i dont see any huge failures with GNOME I’m not shifting anything to you. Your failures are yours alone.
“I still can’t see anything wrong with the lengthy comments and none so far complained about them or proven them wrong. Just because it’s so nice on OSNews.com to moderate everything and everyone down doesn’t make the context or comment that got moderated down less valid or false. Just because some of you come up here repeating the quoted nonsense over and over again still doesn’t make it valid or true.
Why don’t you start saying what’s wrong ? Until now all you did was diffamating a person and nothing else. No word, no single complaint of what was written. Can I and the others assume that the context then is correct ? Can we say the stuff found inside is true ? It must be the case otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to hide, nothing for the GNOME people to feel ashamed about. You also kept ignoring where I post about the other people you scared away.”
thats because you are like those sick-in-the-head indiviuals who go to town centre to preach that we are all going to die unless we start preaching to god. there’s no point in debating with such blind to reason people because they just won’t listen to reason. they won’t listen because they don’t want to see reason, they just want to see their own bleiefs. YOU are exactly the same. people here have picked every single hole in your notorious swiss cheese ‘arguments’ for years, but still you repeat the same old garbage. what do you expect people to do? people got sick and tired of showing you where you are totally wrong, so why does it need to be repeated every time you write your infamous party piece?
Till now we only heard stuff like “he is a troll”, “he should visit a doctor”, “he should consult a psychatrist”
The point is, it’s true. You have such a paranoia against the gnome community that you think anyone correctly labelling you as a psycho and a troll is a “Gnomie” that proves you are right.
Proof? You even went ballistic on Roberto Alsina, of the KDE project, when he said you were lying:
“Because KDE is successful, it has achieved all the stuff that GNOME is still trying to catch up with. KDE is there and even ahead of what GNOME is talking for – for years. KDE offers the applications that GNOME barely can deliver, KDE offers the solution for enterprise.”
if that were true, organisations would be falling over themselves to use kde instead of picking gnome. in reality, they are all shunning kde in favour of gnome. what does that tell you?
Anonymous (IP: 130.57.22.—) on 2005-12-01 20:06:59 UTC in reply to “RE: Please”
Ali: you claim GNOME devs are insulting, namecall, not able accept criticism, yet here you are portraying all the same traits you accuse us of having.
Like everywhere and everyone in the world every community will have some rude ones in the bunch.
But James Livingston for example on the rhythmbox project has been extremely patient with those in the community posting requests for updates to patches in order to compile the program with features that we want.
The main guy behind Nautilus (Alexander Laarson maybe?) was actually polite when a badly worded subject line of mine to the mailing list caused a flame storm of my own fault I should add.
Outside of the infamous tussle with Eugenia a while back I have been very pleased with the response I have gotten from most (not all but most) of the developers on the major gnome projects.
> I have gotten from most (not all but most) of the developers on the major gnome projects.
“Not all” is quite an interesting part of your reply and only confirms what I tried to explain. You can also be sure that over the past 6 years – through permanent critics and permanent harrassment – a bunch of the GNOME people learned a lesson that it doesn’t help them to be rude to people.
Besides this some elements have left the project for god’s sake and others got a better job and can’t afford acting like an ass anymore. But I can guarantee you that there used to be times (and specially a bunch of people) that you wished all the pestilence existing on earth. But you can also be sure that there’s still a lot of them amongst them.
Maybe we do have a different understanding of where ‘being rude’ starts and where it ends. What could be rude experience for one can be a normal behave for the other. But then I personally made the experience (maybe through misunderstanding of my person, or maybe through bad english or whatever) that a good bunch of the GNOME people are quite rude. Not just that but also the amount of shit they have caused around me as person and then widespread deserves a reaction from my side as well.
So at the end, if no one wants to believe me, then at least take my advise to be careful when it comes in terms of GNOME. Staying away from it is always better than messing around with it.
Besides that Waldo is still working on KDE the other guy probably too. But all the ones I mentioned realized that it’s better to stay away from GNOME – with other words, they don’t work on GNOME anymore.
do you even realise that for any community effort, you get out what you put in? seeing your ‘efforts’ on OSNews, i’m not at all surprised that you have gotten the reaction that you claim have have fomr the gnome (or any other community for that matter). you remind me of these individuals who go through life blaming everyone else but themselves for their own shortcomings.
if i were you, i would either seek professional help from a sympathetic councillor or a psychiatrist. because you are seriously not right in the head.
And I hope he goes for the medical attention before he does something crazy. I mean, all those gratuitous references to karate lessons look worrying considering mails like this one:
hehe it sounds like Ali has a problem with being small. that can be interpreted any way you like . he’s obviously quite a tough guy threatening people on mailing lists.
I am quite upset about this place and find it embarrassing how people are treated. To set something correct. I wasn’t banned from this place and still I am not as you can see here. For what reason actually ?
I had many discussions with Eugenia in the past and we came to the conclusion that most of the stuff that I keep writing is indeed right but for my personal interest I should stay out of heated conversations because it’s impossible to convince everyone. So far she was right. But then this is a free place after all with the intend of people replying.
Well now coming to the point of what I write. I don’t think that I have to justify myself here, nor do I need to explain why I write things and why not.
About my history, I don’t think I have to justify myself about my history here. You can go back and read the stuff that I have written and I don’t need to feel ashamed about it since most of the stuff written by me only reflect my very personal experiences with GNOME and only reflect my very personal opinion too. People are free to reply on it or simply ignore it.
I don’t have problems with GNOME and their goal for world domination or whatever. But I have something against people wo don’t play fair. You need very good knowledge about GNOME (now not the architecture) but more of the internal function of GNOME as organ to understand what’s going on and what not. And I believe that the majority of the readers here don’t have a gripe of knowledge what’s going on. Why don’t you spent some time investigating into GNOME on your own. Learn the politics and not just the desktop.
You people gonna harvest the fruits for the problems you caused. And you can be sure that I will ne assured in my process to make everyone understand what’s up with GNOME and their community. You people did nearly all to trash my name within the past years. Regardless for all the contributions I gave to GNOME. But then people will read this and understand that I am right. Even if they don’t believe me, they will realize and become careful before helping or trusting the GNOME community. Be it that. I am off for my Karate course now.
A rather easy solution to that one, if the OSNews please could post the name of the other accounts “dummy_account” uses plus the Ip he usually troll under. Showing everyone without doubt which clueless looser is behind, and then banning the moron.
Thanks for the words Morty. I do feel sorry somehow but then I know it’s not me. But welcome in the world of GNOME, that’s how it usually works. That’s GNOME! Sad isn’t it?
GNOME is more targeted for the non-expert-end-users because of all this stupid simplification and their new target users. KDE luckely didn’t changed their target audience that’s why many people switched (and still switch) from GNOME to KDE because it offers them what they expect. A seamless consistent and integrated Desktop Environment. Sure it has it’s edges and corners but all in all it’s moving in the REAL right direction. That’s why many people belive that GNOME is redundant these days.
When GNOME saw it’s first light it was targeted for the real powerusers and should offer a free alternative to KDE (which on these days depended on QT (which now is GPL)). While GNOME stagnates because people are more busy talking about what new technology they should assimilate next, the KDE people focused on usability and disciplined programmed a really working Desktop Environment which is superior to all other commerical and F/OSS offerings.
Well, I actually wrote it before the dummy_account looser started his spamming, since you had already posted it twice in this tread. Repeating the same long posts gets annoying regardless of their validity. It’s sad when valid on topic commnets get moderated down by losers, but please find another way to respond to it.
Sadly there are several sad losers on this site, but it does not help sinking to their level.
Hopefully the OSNews staff will reveal all the accounts used by dummy_account and the IP he usually troll with, identifying that particular looser at least.
> Well, I actually wrote it since you had already posted it twice in this tread. Repeating
> the same long posts gets annoying regardless of their validity. It’s sad when valid on topic
> commnets get moderated down by losers, but please find another way to respond to it.
You are right, take my apologizes but it’s a shame that a valid constructive correct comment which was moderated +4 in all three parts lasted a few hours and then within seconds got moderated down to -4. As you can see it was intended by some loosers to do this because they can’t stand criticism. It was surely not nice but necessary to repost it.
> Sadly there are several sad losers on this site, but it does not help sinking to
> their level.
You are indeed right, but then what purpose has a news site if you are not allowed to post a valid comment or rather a criticism.
> Hopefully the OSNews staff will reveal all the accounts used by dummy_account and
> the IP he usually troll with, identifying that particular looser at least.
I contacted Eugenia about that abuse and she forwarded my request to the OSN staff. It’s good to know that she’s aware of the problem and it’s also good to know that the OSN staff is involved and investigates into the abuse. And I do feel ok since I know that there are still people with senses outside who seem to understand the problems around GNOME. It’s definately not fun anymore working on GNOME for people like those.
Wow, I just came back from nearly 1.75hrs of Karate training and the insanity is still going on here. People still keeping up with the namecalling efforts even without participation of the accused ones. The GNOME community is laughable but it will pay off at the end with people leaving and more people understanding the problem. I doubt anyone wants to participate to such an highly offensive community. Linux is a community, KDE is a community, XFCE, E and nearly everything else is a community. But GNOME is commercialism and marketing.
Ali, if you keep saying that this spamming is because of the mythical “gnome community”, stop that “dummy_account is not me, stop saying that” attitude. You’re being a huge hypocrite. As always, I’m afraid.
Oh, and stop going to karate and consult a psychology professional. You need it much more.
How do I get it? I’m running Ubuntu, which only provides security fixes, so unless I switch to the ‘development’ repository (which pulls in loads of other stuff and isn’t properly supported) I’m stuck. I’ve looked into other distros and the situation is the same.
So basically I’ve got to compile the whole lot from source, or start using a mid-development distro to get it. Why can’t I just double-click a file or two like in so many other OSes?
This is really why Linux needs some form of API, ABI and platform stability. This new GNOME release fixes a stack of bugs and yet hardly any Linux users can get it without going through a messy tangle of operations…
>Why can’t I just double-click a file or two like in so many other OSes?
Because Gnome is a *platform*, not an “application”. By being a platform, it means that it has to integrate itself on each different distribution or Unix or X server, mostly the same way, but not always the same. Sometimes extra patches or changes have to be made for some of these distros or OSes. And this is why when it comes to platforms, you need to WAIT for your distro/OS to upgrade.
If you can’t wait, just compile it youself and lose the “warranty”. Or, switch to a development version of your distro. Or, switch to a distro that are “faster” to provide updates, like the Arch Linux updates earlier today.
Would it be cool if there was an API/ABI compatiblity as you wish? Sure it would be. But it is not, and it ain’t gonna happen. “Choice” is at the same time a gift and a curse in the Linux world.
Is there a gnu/linux distro that does clean seperation between base os and third party applications and platforms.
I’m using freebsd and have gnome 2.12.2 running as of this morning. The clean seperation of os and ports is what keeps me here. It’s nice to have the latest and greatest in the application world such as rhythmbox 9.2, firefox 1.5, gnome 2.12.1 while maintaing a stable os.
Just courious
Yes, Arch Linux does that. The base tree is called… “-base”. Then, if you want, you can add -Current or -Extra, but that’s up to the user only.
Sweet, I’ll have to check that out.
Thank you
Arch isn’t the only Linux distribution that provides (what I interpret as your definition of) a clean separation between base OS and platform. Most will give you a choice of desktop platforms, and some boot for the first time in text-mode. Slackware and Rubix divide their packages into broad categories separating the base from the rest. Gentoo divides packages into a sort of two-tiered organization and provides a base package group. Even the big RPM distributions make it easy to install just a base operating system.
However, as a FreeBSD user, I would suggest you check out Arch. It is definitely the most FreeBSD-like of the Linux distributions.
Perhaps I should explain more. Freebsd is considered the os. It is completly seperate from anything third party. You can run the same OS with out upgrades while upgrading third party packages (ports) daily. This way I get the latest version’s of the software I use. My base OS does not change at all. Ports also all go in /usr/local/* while the base os goes in the normal locations.
Gentoo is I remember correctly sorta has the seperation I’m talking about. But emerge world still upgrades everthing, even base. And they still treat everthing like a whole instead of seperating out os/non os
>Gentoo is I remember correctly sorta has the seperation
>I’m talking about. But emerge world still upgrades
>everthing, even base. And they still treat everthing
>like a whole instead of seperating out os/non os
The only thing in Portage that is “the OS” would be kernel source packages. If you do a blind emerge update (like, emerge -uD world), which you should never do… it would in fact automatically pull down a new kernel source tree. But, this is just a source tree (another kernel in your /usr/src… it doesn’t even remove the old one, you do that by hand). Source does nothing, you’d have to go compile / copy the kernel over by hand to do any actual OS changing.
Thats the difference. If I do a blind portupgrade -ua “portage equavilent” then it will download and install everthing third party to freebsd. The base os uses different tools and is seperate.
Sorry if I’m not being real clear. If you have a spare machine try freebsd out if you have time. I’m certainly going to try arch.
Right, but I’m saying that all Gentoo does (in regards to the OS) is grabs some source. Nothing in the OS ever changes with an emerge, just like ports… emerge garbs “everything 3rd party to Gentoo” plus the new kernel source so you have it if you ever want to upgrade at your liesure.
By OS, I think he’s also refering to the standard tools, e.g. sh, init, etc.
Ya, Sorry about that. I mean a base system. EG: kernel, shell, init, etc etc
Just so you know. Gentoo has by default a system and a world target. So emerge -uD system would only upgrade what you call the base system. The problem is that the world target implies system.
There are however a few tools floating around the gentoo forums that let you do world upgrades without touching system.
emwrap is one example, it even ads a third target for the development tool chain. emwrap -uDsw would thus upgrade base system + world but not touch the tool chain (compiler and stuff).
I have used Arch in the past and I must it is a very nice os, I used FreeBSD on my fileserver.
Both are definitly worth the install.
For my personal use, Arch is much more useful as a desktop then FreeBSD, however, BSD is still good.
Keep in mind, I don’t use Arch, I use something esle, but it is because I am very familiar with it and I know how to administrate my choosen distro very well.
I would recommend Arch or FreeBSD to anybody.
my problem with freebsd (and gentoo for that matter) is that i dont like to sit and wait an hour to install totem with xine because there’s no binary available to install for it.
There are times it would be nice to be able to mod a staff members post up!
I guess it’s became a marketing issue.
The just released gnome packages actually are not products but just components that are are more and more integral part of bigger systems.
As such they shouldn’t be advertised in separation because most people cannot easily reach them directly and a lot of precious excitement that could otherwise be directed to distros is wasted.
Unfortunately people are used to treat project milestone announcements on the same level as product announcements in commercial world.
Not to mention that GNOME supports non-Linux platforms…
But in any case, adding an APT repository doesn’t mean you need to accept any and all package upgrades offered by the new repo. Just grab what you need.
I haven’t used GARNOME or jhbuild in a while, but 2 years ago it wasn’t that difficult, and I imagine it hasn’t gotten any harder.
This doesn’t have anything to do will API/ABI/platform stability. If anything, you can’t get today’s version of GNOME on Ubuntu *because* of platform stability concerns. Distributors might need some time for building, testing, integrating, etc. Remember, the GNOME project releases source code, not binary packages for every distribution known to man. If you have to build it from source, then so does your distributor.
The only reason why “Linux” would need API or ABI stability is to accomodate binary, closed-source kernel modules. There is no end to the reasons why that is a bad idea.
This isn’t even really about choice, as Eugenia suggests. It’s about availability. GNOME 2.12.2 is available. The code is on the FTP servers. That’s how you get it. If you wait a couple days, maybe a couple weeks, someone will actually build the code for you, free of charge, possibly even out of the kindness of their heart alone.
So cut the entitlement crap and be thankful that we have free access to a desktop platform that could surely be assessed at untold millions of dollars in market capitalization.
No, if you switch to a ‘development’ repository and try to pull in just Gnome, it turns into a massive sprawl of invasive system upgrades, right down to GCC being upgraded. Lots and lots of testing versions all around.
Someone will build the code for me? Why should users have to wait for some random joe to build it for their specific distro? With API and ABI consistency, the GNOME project would be able to produce generic binaries that ran on all distros, so that EVERYONE could enjoy the GNOME bugfixes.
It’s nothing to do with ‘kernel modules’. It’s about giving people access to software in a clean, elegant and consistent way — like so many other OSes have sorted out over the years.
“The only reason why “Linux” would need API or ABI stability is to accomodate binary, closed-source kernel modules.”
Uhm, no. No no no no no. Have you never heard of third party OPEN SOURCE kernel modules? Take for example FUSE. It’s a royal pain in the *** to have to recompile it every time I upgrade my kernel. Or sysprof, the system-wide profiler. I shouldn’t have to recompile it every time I upgrade my kernel. Having a stable kernel API and ABI would hugely benefit the open source kernel modules.
What you’re talking about is one of the (many) problems with repository-based package managers. You could try slackware, which has a user-managed package system, where you get to decide what to upgrade when. I have a few scripts made up to manage/create packages from nautilus, which I can put online if you’d like.
what exactly do you mean by “user-managed package system”? i know about rpm and tarballs etc, but i’m wondering iof there’s is something that i’m not knowing about slackwear by your use of the term.
Presumeably he means that you, the user, are the one in control, rather than the package management-system, wrt what packages and what dependencies get installed or upgraded.
What you’re talking about is one of the (many) problems with repository-based package managers. You could try slackware, which has a user-managed package system, where you get to decide what to upgrade when. I have a few scripts made up to manage/create packages from nautilus, which I can put online if you’d like.
You have to write scripts to manage your packages, whereas repository-based package manager users don’t. I have not yet met a repository-based package manager that did not allow you to use it (via some force flags) as you would “installpkg”.
Slackware guys pound in over and over that they like having control over their system. For me, I like having a system I understand. I understand the slackware package management system thoroughly, and most of its users do.
A lot of those who understand it start to augment it with scripts. When i ran slackware (yes, i don’t much anymore) i was constantly cooking up scripts and programs of various complexity to augment my package management. In the end i decided to give some other distros a whirl, and really spend some time with their package management (at least 6 months), and found a comfortable niche elsewhere.
But the control slackware users talk about, its mostly “understanding”. The slackware package tools will almost never do something that isn’t easily explainable. If you understand a package management system thoroughly, though, you can use pretty much all of them to your liking.
As others have pointed out, Gnome really is a core part of the platform.
Can you imagine upgrading Explorer on Windows without a set of official patches from Microsoft?
This situation is (somewhat) similar. The vendor provides the Gnome with their customizations, and therefore they need to stabilize and provide the updates.
Good distributions are a little slow at doing this by design (eg, Gentoo still doesn’t have 2.12 in stable), in part because their 2.12.1 probably already has at least some patches from the 2.12.2 branch.
“This is really why Linux needs some form of API, ABI and platform stability. ”
No, *you* need to wait a little bit so that your distro can have a chance to integrate it.
A little bit? As in six months to a year, depending on when the next _stable_ distro release is out?
If this was the other way round, and normal users had to wait six months on Windows for bugfixed free software releases, whereas Linux users could just double-click stuff as it arrives, you’d be mocking Microsoft ’til the cows come home.
Double standards indeed. Most other OSes have sorted this out, Linux hasn’t, so stop trying to squirm out of it…
“If this was the other way round, and normal users had to wait six months on Windows for bugfixed free software releases, whereas Linux users could just double-click stuff as it arrives, you’d be mocking Microsoft ’til the cows come home.”
Woah you are so far off the truth.
Currently Windows users have to wait closer to 6 years for major releases… well, I guess the service packs make it out once every couple of years.
Also, Gnome do maintainence releases (2.12.2 has been released already) every month or two.
Security patches are available instantly, since the development is open. A good distro has them integrated within a few hours at the most.
In the future, perhaps you should do some research before tirading about open source release processes.
“Currently Windows users have to wait closer to 6 years for major releases… well, I guess the service packs make it out once every couple of years.”
Er, I said bugfixed free software releases. Please read correctly before writing such a comment.
And it’s true. When a new free app comes out on Windows, users can just double-click and install.
With Linux, you have to wait six months (or a year) for it to be in your next stable distro release, or risk some ‘development’ repository, or scour the net for binaries that may not work with your specific distro, or compile the app (and all its dependencies) from source. A few projects have, wisely, adopted Autopackage to mitigate that, but for the most part it’s a horrible tangle.
I’d suggest looking around the net to see users struggling to get new software releases installed, and then tell me it’s not a hindrance to more widespread Linux desktop adoption…
Er, I said bugfixed free software releases.
Yer? Many bugfixes come about in the next version of Microsoft software. Windows Updates are only designed for security patches, apart from serious functionality problems. You may get a service pack if you’re lucky, but you have to wait for that or you may not get it at all.
I’d suggest looking around the net to see users struggling to get new software releases installed, and then tell me it’s not a hindrance to more widespread Linux desktop adoption…
I have to agree there – it is a problem. There are some things package repositories are good at, especially for providing update to your distribution, but you simply can’t install the wide variety of software there is out there through a package repository. Specific repositories also lock you into a particular distribution, or can be used to force you to upgrade when support is removed which doesn’t sit well with me or others.
I’d suggest looking around the net to see users struggling to get new software releases installed, and then tell me it’s not a hindrance to more widespread Linux desktop adoption…
Yes! I agree with you..!. Even if they manged to install, then they dont know how to run the program after that…( where to look and what is the file name to run!!..). Some people say that is lack of Linux knowldege.. Desktop user has to be a programmer?
I presume you are same anonymous who’s been hammering away on this same issue in 3 or 4 articles over the last few days? If so, I really can’t imagine what it is you hope to accomplish. It’s been explained to you why things are the way they are and, further, why they are highly unlikely change anytime in the near future. If you can’t reconcile yourself to that, then Linux quite obviously isn’t the best choice for you. By all means enjoy your Win and/or Mac computing experience, but please understand there are some of us who have found that the Linux way(s) of managing software packages better suits our needs. Not perfect, and certainly not without considerable room for improvement, but, on the whole, far better suited to our purposes.
“A little bit? As in six months to a year, depending on when the next _stable_ distro release is out? ”
Guess you should use a different distro then?
“If this was the other way round, and normal users had to wait six months on Windows for bugfixed free software releases, whereas Linux users could just double-click stuff as it arrives, you’d be mocking Microsoft ’til the cows come home. ”
That’s a bull comparison. I seem to have forgot, did MS give Windows95 users free upgrades to Windows98?
Does MS release major updates more often than 6 months?
Why this post is modded up is beyond me.
I don’t see any major improvement in Gnome. It’s still ugly, colors are dull and there is this stupid foot. Also each time you click a folder inside another one, it opens new windows over and over again like pop ups (unless you use Nautilus). This makes me mad.
You make me mad…
Sorry. Shouldn’t have sad that. I like Gnome, but I like KDE too. They both have their positive and negative sides.
is it possible to extract a password protected RAR archive with right mouse click in Nautilus (Nautilus use File-Roller for extracting)?
It would be nice if Gnome/Nautilus/File-Roller could detect this file type (password protected rar file) and show me a password dialog.
With Gnome 2.12.1, this was not possible
Thanks for answers
it is possible on any gnome. you just need 2 packages: rar and unrar.
> it is possible on any gnome. you just need 2 packages: rar and unrar
P A S S W O R D P R O T E C T E D
unRARing just works fine…
On a related note, while Nautilus/Roller extracts a broad assortment of archive formats, the right-click->create archive feature offers no selection of formats, defaulting to tar.gz. It would be nice if they added one more dropdown menu to that dialog for creating zip or tar.bz2 archives. I think I’ll go file that request…
If you just change the file extension to .tar.bz2 file-roller will create a .tar.bz2 archive.
It defaults to zip for dropline gnome, at least. It will automatically use the right format if you change the extension.
can someone direct me to a changelog and/or a list of new features?
thanks!
Follow the link (released). A fairly detailed changelog is included with the announcement. Sorry for outing you as a non-article-reader.
I would like to see nautilus implement a nice search and filter interface. I’d like to be able to search within folders and also filter files within folders based their types. I’m surprised the Nautilus crew don’t find these functions crucial for a file manager.
Well theres already filtering. For example, if I wanted to select all the PNGs from a folder I can go:
[Edit] -> [Select Pattern] -> *.png
But that only works if all the images have extensions. It would nice to have filtering based on MIME type.
“It would nice to have filtering based on MIME type.”
Agreed.
There’s already a search tool called gnome-search-tool, and there should be a script floating around on the net that runs it from nautilus (it’s just a 2-line shell script). You can select files matching a pattern by going to edit->select pattern.
Last night I blew away by Gentoo/KDE install in favour of Ubuntu (mainly because of great Gnome integration).. So now, at least in the short term I am happy. But, I really have to think, when are we going to see the next big step for Gnome as a platform? At least with KDE, the porting effort to QT4 has got things rolling – but, will my beloved Gnome cope against KDE4, Aqua, (And Vista?) et al!?
Kudos to the Gnome team for another fine release!
what is it that you want??? its only the desktop environment and some utilities. i’m not quite sure what all the excitement is about, and i certainly don’t know why anyone would mess with an existing stable 2.12 installation (like ubuntu’s) to get and compile a point release that i am sure is visually INDISTINGUISHABLE from what was there before.
some people just like to download and compile.
This is really why Linux needs some form of API, ABI and platform stability. This new GNOME release fixes a stack of bugs and yet hardly any Linux users can get it without going through a messy tangle of operations…
On FreeBSD only “portsnap fetch ; portsnap update ; portupgrade -a” for a minor GNOME release [2.12.0 => 2.12.2], for a major upgrade a script is provided [2.10.x => 2.12.0], pretty easy.
If you would like to see things changed, you are free to create a tool to do the job. 😉
More than 30 comments for a Gnome related article and still no pro-KDE trolls. This is absolutely stuning.
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn’t possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it’s the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
When looking at this legendary example picture:
http://img234.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot34ji.jpg
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don’t want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view – they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what’s wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your “Menus & Toolbars” capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It’s a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don’t support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need one I know this too) share the same Toolbar object, if you change global settings then it automatically affect all applications (icons only, text under icons, drag handles etc.) the Toolbar object comes with an toolbar editor (to change icons, text under icons, draghandle, icon size etc.). This speaks about KDE’s great architecture which is pretty well designed.
Again this is just a small example to not make the understanding overwhelming complex. There are many other issues (architectual nature) inside GNOME and it goes on in many areas such as gnome-vfs (which is quite broken, there is no progress information when copying files from FTP (deep directory structures with many files), aborting is nearly impossible and so on (not to speak about many other modules, but FTP is the one I know best) like copying 0 byte files over and so on.
Basic stuff still in stable GNOME that don’t work reliable enough to get serious work done. People always come up with the same BS that GNOME is the light desktop, that it’s so great, clean and so on, that it’s the desktop to get work done. Evince crashing when selecting text, crashing on exit, gnome-print saving documents as *.ps files show other font or save corrupt data and and and.
But this is not the case to say the truth. As a former student of computer and economics science as well as I am now an IT-Project leader I depended on doing stuff for University such as drawing diagrams or UML stuff. I depended (since I was a hardcore GNOMER) on tools like DIA to try getting the work done. But DIA was a poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk (with lost hours of work). My university professor one day looked at me, and asked me whether I painted the use case diagram with a paint program. I told him that I was using DIA and I saw a smile on his face which he left uncommented afterwards.
Even printing doesn’t work reliable in DIA, nor does it work reliable enough in other applications. I had to search for alternatives and landed on KDE using Kivio and Umbrello. These apps surely aren’t the best apps existing, but they gave me more the feeling to get my work done. They worked, felt ok and the printout results was great. Not to mention that my learning curve was minimal since the apps reminded me quite a lot on commercial counterparts found on Microsoft Windows.
Like printing GIF images as black image (totally black paper printout), like not supporting printing more pages on one physical sheet (evince for example) and these things exists in gnome-print/ui and are an elementary thing of the stable gnome releases recently. I wanted to print a document with 120 pages in evince on 4 pages per 1 physical sheet, which should end up in 30 pages of paper. but after I came back from dinner I saw that evince printed it on 120 pages rather than 30 as I was assuming. These things can not be.
Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox. It’s quite frustrating and irritating to get dialogs all the time telling one that something is broken. same applies for the “get emails as soon as you start evolution” bug, specially if you use freemailers with timeout you keep stuck in getting dialogs all the time you start evolution telling one that it can not pop emails due to timeout of the mail isp.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
This argument is pointless with out specific examples. Gnome works fine for many users, including myself.
When looking at this legendary example picture
A common image used by yourself for trolling. But I’ll bite. EasyTag is an application that uses GTK, not a Gnome application. There is work underway to make it HIG compliant. AbiWord is a word processor and hence attempts to use the smaller toolbar layout common across all currently available competitors (on both linux and win32). The other windows are GEdit (a Gnome app) and Nautilus (a Gnome App). Note the similarity of button / toolbar size. Nautilus now defaults to spatial – hence no toolbar. The browser mode has configurable large / small icons. Finally, Evolution, another Gnome app (i.e. part of the platform) also uses the Gnome toolbar style. The dropdown on the New option is to mimic similar functionality used within Outlook, its main inspiration.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation
OO has nothing to do with it. That’s just FUD. If a library provides a Toolbar object (which GTK does) then any code can use it. Note you were previously discussing the problems of C. Here I see it as a benefit – ease of wrapper production. Note how many languages use wrappers around the core Gnome C libraries and happily make use of GTK.
poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk
Naturally you filed bugs on any problems you encountered, discussed them in forums, and dropped into irc to chat with the devs? No?
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ?
Sorry, had to quote that classic comment. Who judges about toolbars indeed….
Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
evolution-data-server, “About Me”, DBUS.
Look, I agree Gnome could do with some tinkering and improvement in many areas, but so could KDE. No DE is perfect, nor is one a better choice than another. I primarily use Gnome, but also have KDE around just to experience something different. I don’t understand why XFCE, IceWM, WM etc don’t get this sort of abuse from fanatics. This sort of attitude is pointless and a waste of your own time and others time. The energy spent copy and pasting that rant could have been much better spent contributing to your OSS project of choice.
Back on topic for the article, its good to see some minor improvements being made to Gnome 2.12. I’m looking forward to more of Frederico’s improvements making it into minor releases, as the numbers really add up. Congratulations on some great work to all involved.
“Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox…”
I use OpenSUSE and I must say the Evolution version there is the first Evolution version which really fullfills ALL my needs:
– Big local Maildir directory support which really works
– I can search through ALL my mail directories: IMAP and Maildir with the help of VFolders
– GPG signature/encryption is now nicely integrated
SUSE solved all the former problems with this version. I haven’t had trashed sync files etc. with this version although my local mailbox has 450 MByte.
You should really check out the new OpenSUSE which is the fastest distribution I have ever tested (SUPER optimized with pePr preloading).
And you can use Evolution under KDE without problems which I do now because KDE is so damn fast under OpenSUSE
“As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME…”
How brave of you to write your 3-post whining diatribe as “Anonymous”.
Such things can not be in corporate desktops. If you really consider people and companies who spent a lot of money into their busiens to use GNOME then please make sure these issues don’t exist anymore.
Continuing with my work. As I said I am an IT-Project leader now and need to deal with projects these days. Again using Planner as the only existing GNOME Project management software I ended up in frustrations since Planner is more like a toy than a mature application. Again I had to switch over to KDE to use Task Juggler for this kind of activity, simply for the fact that Task Juggler came quite close to MS Project, offered a lot of features and is free to use.
Same applies in many other areas comparing GNOME with KDE (Rhythmbox vs. amaroK) and so on. We see how quickly KDE applications progress and become mature. Now with better C++ support and more developers and users KDE becomes better and better. The applications are miles ahead of what GNOME has to offer and basic functions like sound, printing, good looks, consistency, integration and interoperability simply works. Sure KDE is far from perfect but chosing between these two desktops KDE simply wins in all areas.
And that’s an important factor. Of course GNOME has the same choice to lead the desktops but sadly it hasn’t and I am not willing to wait years over years only to see GNOME making less steps forward.
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ? What is the ones disadvantage is the others pet feature. Some people say that KDE is overengineered but I say that GNOME peoples lost focus. I recall when SUN started doing the usability studies some years ago. It didn’t took long and the majority of people magically became all usability experts over night. And good applications became got turned nearly into a productivity barrier (if you ever happen to be productive with GNOME at all) I always find myself fiddlign around in things that simply don’t work. And I keep spending more hours in fixing the issues rather than start using the Desktop to get anything done. Always when you quickly need something you end up being lost on GNOME and its tools.
Another big issues is trying to contribute to GNOME.
Look, when I started to help out GNOME around 1999 or so I defiantely didn’t came and called the people “jerks”. This has been grown out over the long time of six years. I have never been treated like a piece of shit as I was when trying to help GNOME to help shape GNOME, to be part of it. But I had to deal with ignorants, hardheaded people, egoists and a lot of people who are incapable to work together with others.
Even if you as developer want to contribute to GNOME you are under permanent attack, you receive nothing else than huge diffamation, attacks, namecalling, slandering and so on. This drives people away from contributing to GNOME.
Most developers around GNOME are some sort of having found themselves in “groups” they usually block every contribution from outside and usually declare valid and good stuff as stupid, silly or as troll attempt. This is quite frustrating for people who want to contribute. The attempt to contribute something towards GNOME is a very stone way and usually leads to frustrations at the end.
The best thing for contributors is to do the dirt work. The leftovers which the GNOME developers don’t want to work on. Like writing documentations, doing the translations and so on. But as soon as it goes to normal bugfixes for bugs that are known for years these bugreports stay in bgo without attention. If you happen to have some time please head over to bgo and have a look on your own and you see how many bugs have been left there without attention. No comments, not even a feedback why the bug has been rejected or what was wrong with it.
Totally impossible is it as soon as you want to contribute some sort of features (because you reject working on the dirty leftovers or the simple patches that no one gives a f–k for). Working on features is usually the fun part of contributing. You are then directed to put your patches on bgo with comments like “we will have a look at that later” and then it stays there without any feedback for years. They are not interested to get new people helping that project.
Now I hope you may imagine why I don’t have very good words left for GNOME. Sure not everyone is guilty not everyone is an ass or behaves like that, but you need to take my apology that I stopped separating the good ones from the bad ones. I am seriously tired doing this.
Also really frustrating is the heavy abuse inside the GNOME community, those whom we as members have elected behave like patrons on their positions. A lot of my friends whom initially tried contributing to GNOME has been scared away due to bad practices and always repeated attacks (its like a dejavu now). Most normal people never heard about these kinds of practices or can’t imagine that this can really be happening – but sadly from my perspective this is the case.
Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave “GNOME GIRLS” he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren’t great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create “GNOME GIRLS” and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it’s roots and focus for users and users needs.
Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.
That’s why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.
KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It’s easier to build, it’s all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren’t really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.
KDE isn’t much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:
qt-copy arts kdelibs kdebase kdeutils kdenetwork kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdegames kdepim koffice kdesdk kdevelop kdewebdev kdeedu kdetoys kdeartwork
Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don’t need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it’s there.
Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It’s no real integration, just some “hack” which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?
I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.
I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don’t like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.
Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.
To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure bullshit in my opinion. Windows isn’t a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn’t been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don’t decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.
..again. Flamefest begin.
and stop modding yourself up with the help of fake accounts.
This is simply childish, to put it mildly.
Gnome 2.x should stay stable and just keep many of the poor areas. It is more important with something that stay the same than something that makes things a bit bether.
Gnome 3.x should maybe be started around the time of gnome 2.14. Maybe the big suporters should shift their manpower to that goal, but they should also keep working on gnome 2.16 and keep gnome 2.x stable.
A stable gnome 2.x can lather live in coexistense with gnome 3.x as that new platform matures trough time. This wil give the users something predictable to use and let the weakneses of the platform be addressed at the same time. All major plattforms of some age needs some tweaks from time to time.
I do agree with you. I also hope that GNOME 3.x is being written mainly with MONO in mind to keep interoperability with other architectures such as Windows or OSX. To keep development simple, easy to maintain and to make bigger progress. Great programs such as F-Spot, Beagle, Muine, Tomboy and others are written in it. The applications look quite promising and the object oriented approach make it possible to do rapid application development.
Why vote would go for using MONO in the upcoming version of GNOME as much as possible and have it become a core part of the entire GNOME plattform. As it is now already since some of the tools such as F-Spot and Beagle are already part of the GNOME distribution.
There is no GNOME without MONO and no MONO without GNOME.
I do not have anything against the technology in mono, but I do fear Microsoft. Another posibility is for Sun to open up Java and use that as a fundation. Java and mono is mostly the same anyway.
The basic infrastructure should keep C or use c++. gcc have no problems with c++ anymore. Most likely not much use of going for c++ here.
Gnome should anyway keep focus on openness for different languages. Developers have different backgrounds and different choises.
There is no GNOME without MONO and no MONO without GNOME.
Yes, but there could there be GNOME without REDHAT since there’s no REDHAT with GNOME with MONO?
They’ve made their position clear, they won’t accept mono. They’ll work around it where they can (as they did with the OOo2 java dependencies to gcj), but they won’t accept it as a requirement.
Note, I’m not commenting on the relevancy of mono, I’m not a developer so can’t comment one way or the other, just pointing out the challenge Gnome may face balancing the requirements of their two biggest backers (RH and Novell). If Redhat ever pulled out of Gnome, it would be a blow to the organization.
> Yes, but there could there be GNOME without REDHAT since there’s no REDHAT with GNOME
> with MONO?
Yes there can. GNOME was a community project and probably still is. So whatever RedHat or any other Hat says is irrelevant.
> They’ve made their position clear, they won’t accept mono. They’ll work around it where
> they can (as they did with the OOo2 java dependencies to gcj), but they won’t accept it as
> a requirement.
Who are “They” ? Again GNOME is not owned by any company. It’s primarily community driven and the majority of the people who spent their time hacking on GNOME are using MONO for other project as well. If “They” whoever tey are don’t accept Mono then it’s their problem. GNOME is what the community is making out of it.
> balancing the requirements of their two biggest backers (RH and Novell).
Since when does Novell back GNOME ? Novell is up doing their own business and Novell also fired most of the GNOME people recently, this includes
a) nearly all Evolution hackers
b) nearly all Hula hackers
c) nearly all <forgot the name> hackers.
Backing GNOME up sounds the oposite to me.
> If Redhat ever pulled out of Gnome, it would be a blow to the organization.
They are not pulled out of GNOME, they have simply to go the way the developers move. If they can’t get hold of MONO then they can do whatever they want even fork GNOME if they prefer. But this won’t get them anywhere without the already present developers (who prefer MONO).
Novell didn’t fire nearly all of the GNOME/Evolution/Hula hackers at all.
1 Evolution hacker quit.
1 Hula hacker got layed off.
1 GNOME developer got layed off.
0 Mono hackers got layed off.
7 KDE developers got layed off.
this is true and can be verified. the rumour put about that all the hula and evolution hackers got sacked was nothing more than a vicious rumour put about by a kde fanboy who had just got the sack from his kde job.
and only the gullible and the clueless such as IP 84.129.215 believed it and continue to believe it.
When Gnome developers will replace Nautilus with a decent
file manager ?
no serious nautilus right now is useless….
Tell me, in what way is nautilus useless? You must be right because i’ve been using it for years, I wondered why I never ever got anything done.
Is this the same uselessness of xfce4 filemanager or a whole new level?. I’m guessing your using Spartilus mode and you have not worked it out yet!
Edited 2005-12-01 13:24
> I wondered why I never every got anything done.
That’s why
luckily for him, he wasn’t using konqueror. he would definitely be getting things done then – like coding for kde to get rid of all the bugs, to stop it crashing every 15 minites, to speed it up to even a snails pace, to stop it being a resource hog, and to make it at least semi-usable.
I suppose you haven’t used KDE for a long time, right?
“I suppose you haven’t used KDE for a long time, right?”
not since yesterday when i used 3.4.2, no. why? has konqueror changed since then?
You seem to be living in a dark cave. KDE 3.5 got released days ago.
i’m not living in the dark ages at all, but some other people are. if you inspect 3.5 carefuly, you will see that konquerer hasn’t yet metamorphosed into something thats even semi-usable. same old same old.
Different people have different needs, apparently. With the 3.5 release, I was able to switch to Konqi from Firefox, and I don’t miss anything, while I gained speed and integration.
Konq seems usable to me in 3.4.2 as a web browser and file manager. What do you think is missing?
like coding for kde to get rid of all the bugs, to stop it crashing every 15 minites
Nope.
to speed it up to even a snails pace
If Konqueror is that slow, what the hell’s Nautilus?
to stop it being a resource hog
Resource hog how?
and to make it at least semi-usable.
Well, when I use a file manager I expect to be able to see a list of files and folders in something less than 20 seconds and I actually want to be able to copy large files.
Are you sure you’re not getting your file managers mixed up here?
“If Konqueror is that slow, what the hell’s Nautilus?”
considerably faster. but then you wouldn’t know because you’ve never used nautilus. or so your opinions of it show.
“Resource hog how?”
because its big, ugly, and bloated. what do you expect? a file manager that even makes my breakfast in the morning to be skimpy on resources? i think not. its also so tied in to other parts of kde that it brings down other applications too when it goes down(frequently)
“Well, when I use a file manager I expect to be able to see a list of files and folders in something less than 20 seconds and I actually want to be able to copy large files.
Are you sure you’re not getting your file managers mixed up here?”
i’m positively certain. see the comments made by kde’s own aaron krill on some of its problems.
> considerably faster. but then you wouldn’t know because you’ve never used nautilus.
> or so your opinions of it show.
Actually on my system (GNOME CVS) Nautilus is quite a lot slower than (KDE SVN) Konqueror.
> because its big, ugly, and bloated. what do you
> expect? a file manager that even makes my breakfast
> in the morning to be skimpy on resources? i think
> not. its also so tied in to other parts of kde that
> it brings down other applications too when it goes
> down(frequently)
I see the professionalism in your way of replying. Actually Konqueror can not be bloated since it’s nothing more than a Window around the kparts and kioslaves modell. The rest of your explaination only shows how retarded you are.
“I see the professionalism in your way of replying. Actually Konqueror can not be bloated since it’s nothing more than a Window around the kparts and kioslaves modell. The rest of your explaination only shows how retarded you are.”
haha and you’re not. i nearly choked on my lunch when i read the above. you, the person who lives in a fantasy world that he used to be a gnome developer and continually posts the same old rubbish on each and every thread about gnome showing his total and complete lack of understanding of gnome.
considerably faster. but then you wouldn’t know because you’ve never used nautilus. or so your opinions of it show.
Since you don’t know how slow Nautilus is, and that you’ve never used Konqueror and you’re stirring around for soundbites…..
because its big, ugly, and bloated.
The same old words again. So how is it a resource hog then? Do you have figures on memory usage, especially taking into account KDE and Konqueror reuse infinitely more code than anything in Gnome?
its also so tied in to other parts of kde that it brings down other applications too when it goes down(frequently)
It’s called reuse, it works, it doesn’t crash things at all and it’s something neither Nautilus or Gnome does. I don’t know how you know it crashed frequently when you obviously don’t use it……
see the comments made by kde’s own aaron krill on some of its problems.
They’re not the problems you’ve described by any stretch of the imagination. He’s talking about usability keeping Konqueror’s reuse but making more specific applications – web browser and file manager etc. I happen to agree with that. He’s not describing phantom crashes that don’t happen.
Edited 2005-12-01 18:53
segedunum
have you eevr heard the phrase ‘stop digging’?
have you eevr heard the phrase ‘stop digging’?
Wow, a short comment (at least that’s something) that doesn’t respond to anything. True to form. Your complete lack of a response speaks more volumes than anything you’ve written before.
Well I’ve never eevr’d anything, but have you ever heard the phrase ‘enough said’? ;-).
Edited 2005-12-01 19:20
lol nice way to promote KDE, no wonder why KDE sucks so much.
Yeah KDE devs. did good job choosing you to promote KDE, you are in #kde-promo right? or should I say #GNOME-bashers or maybe #no-life-losers.
KDE is so doomed.
DEAR IP: 84.129.215
WHY DO YO KEEP ON REFUSING TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION THAT I’VE POSED TO YOU ON MANY OCCASSIONS WITHOUT A REPLY:
Q: YOU SLATE THE GNOME DESKTOP TIME AND TIME AGAIN WHILE CONSISTANTLY GETTING YOUR FACTS AND FIGURES WRONG ABOUT IT. THATS WHY NOBODY BELIEVES YOU THAT YOU HAVE EVER DEVELOPED FOR GNOME AS YOU CLAIM TO HAVE DONE. SO THAT PEOPLE KNOW WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM, WHAT WERE THE REASONS FOR YOU CHOOSING TO DEVELOP FOR GNOME RATHER THAN FOR KDE?
Your caps lock button is broken.
no, my caps lock is far from broken. it was purposefully written in caps so that he sees the question much more clearly than he has done in the past.
What do you call a desent filemanager, since it has more fuctionallity than Windows explorer, whats your probelm?
Oh, he has developed for Gnome, just look at his homepage:
http://www.akcaagac.com/index.html
You’ll also find that he has developed many things that one couldn’t describe as roaring successes, which might explain his frustration.
P.S.: Oh, and though I understand you getting angry at him, writing in caps really is impolite and as you have seen, gives Ali a good way to ignore your question.
Running GNOME apps from XFCE works fine here. XFCE has a new filemanager (currently still under development) called “thunar” that’s a great light-weight alternative to nautilus. Every XFCE release now comes with a platform-independent installer, which means that it’s minimal fuss to install the latest XFCE on any *BSD or GNU/Linux distro as soon as it’s been released.
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn’t possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it’s the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
When looking at this legendary example picture:
http://img234.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot34ji.jpg
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don’t want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view – they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what’s wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your “Menus & Toolbars” capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It’s a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don’t support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need one I know this too) share the same Toolbar object, if you change global settings then it automatically affect all applications (icons only, text under icons, drag handles etc.) the Toolbar object comes with an toolbar editor (to change icons, text under icons, draghandle, icon size etc.). This speaks about KDE’s great architecture which is pretty well designed.
Again this is just a small example to not make the understanding overwhelming complex. There are many other issues (architectual nature) inside GNOME and it goes on in many areas such as gnome-vfs (which is quite broken, there is no progress information when copying files from FTP (deep directory structures with many files), aborting is nearly impossible and so on (not to speak about many other modules, but FTP is the one I know best) like copying 0 byte files over and so on.
Basic stuff still in stable GNOME that don’t work reliable enough to get serious work done. People always come up with the same BS that GNOME is the light desktop, that it’s so great, clean and so on, that it’s the desktop to get work done. Evince crashing when selecting text, crashing on exit, gnome-print saving documents as *.ps files show other font or save corrupt data and and and.
But this is not the case to say the truth. As a former student of computer and economics science as well as I am now an IT-Project leader I depended on doing stuff for University such as drawing diagrams or UML stuff. I depended (since I was a hardcore GNOMER) on tools like DIA to try getting the work done. But DIA was a poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk (with lost hours of work). My university professor one day looked at me, and asked me whether I painted the use case diagram with a paint program. I told him that I was using DIA and I saw a smile on his face which he left uncommented afterwards.
Even printing doesn’t work reliable in DIA, nor does it work reliable enough in other applications. I had to search for alternatives and landed on KDE using Kivio and Umbrello. These apps surely aren’t the best apps existing, but they gave me more the feeling to get my work done. They worked, felt ok and the printout results was great. Not to mention that my learning curve was minimal since the apps reminded me quite a lot on commercial counterparts found on Microsoft Windows.
Like printing GIF images as black image (totally black paper printout), like not supporting printing more pages on one physical sheet (evince for example) and these things exists in gnome-print/ui and are an elementary thing of the stable gnome releases recently. I wanted to print a document with 120 pages in evince on 4 pages per 1 physical sheet, which should end up in 30 pages of paper. but after I came back from dinner I saw that evince printed it on 120 pages rather than 30 as I was assuming. These things can not be.
Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox. It’s quite frustrating and irritating to get dialogs all the time telling one that something is broken. same applies for the “get emails as soon as you start evolution” bug, specially if you use freemailers with timeout you keep stuck in getting dialogs all the time you start evolution telling one that it can not pop emails due to timeout of the mail isp.
Such things can not be in corporate desktops. If you really consider people and companies who spent a lot of money into their busiens to use GNOME then please make sure these issues don’t exist anymore.
Continuing with my work. As I said I am an IT-Project leader now and need to deal with projects these days. Again using Planner as the only existing GNOME Project management software I ended up in frustrations since Planner is more like a toy than a mature application. Again I had to switch over to KDE to use Task Juggler for this kind of activity, simply for the fact that Task Juggler came quite close to MS Project, offered a lot of features and is free to use.
Same applies in many other areas comparing GNOME with KDE (Rhythmbox vs. amaroK) and so on. We see how quickly KDE applications progress and become mature. Now with better C++ support and more developers and users KDE becomes better and better. The applications are miles ahead of what GNOME has to offer and basic functions like sound, printing, good looks, consistency, integration and interoperability simply works. Sure KDE is far from perfect but chosing between these two desktops KDE simply wins in all areas.
And that’s an important factor. Of course GNOME has the same choice to lead the desktops but sadly it hasn’t and I am not willing to wait years over years only to see GNOME making less steps forward.
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ? What is the ones disadvantage is the others pet feature. Some people say that KDE is overengineered but I say that GNOME peoples lost focus. I recall when SUN started doing the usability studies some years ago. It didn’t took long and the majority of people magically became all usability experts over night. And good applications became got turned nearly into a productivity barrier (if you ever happen to be productive with GNOME at all) I always find myself fiddlign around in things that simply don’t work. And I keep spending more hours in fixing the issues rather than start using the Desktop to get anything done. Always when you quickly need something you end up being lost on GNOME and its tools.
Another big issues is trying to contribute to GNOME.
Look, when I started to help out GNOME around 1999 or so I defiantely didn’t came and called the people “jerks”. This has been grown out over the long time of six years. I have never been treated like a piece of shit as I was when trying to help GNOME to help shape GNOME, to be part of it. But I had to deal with ignorants, hardheaded people, egoists and a lot of people who are incapable to work together with others.
Even if you as developer want to contribute to GNOME you are under permanent attack, you receive nothing else than huge diffamation, attacks, namecalling, slandering and so on. This drives people away from contributing to GNOME.
Most developers around GNOME are some sort of having found themselves in “groups” they usually block every contribution from outside and usually declare valid and good stuff as stupid, silly or as troll attempt. This is quite frustrating for people who want to contribute. The attempt to contribute something towards GNOME is a very stone way and usually leads to frustrations at the end.
The best thing for contributors is to do the dirt work. The leftovers which the GNOME developers don’t want to work on. Like writing documentations, doing the translations and so on. But as soon as it goes to normal bugfixes for bugs that are known for years these bugreports stay in bgo without attention. If you happen to have some time please head over to bgo and have a look on your own and you see how many bugs have been left there without attention. No comments, not even a feedback why the bug has been rejected or what was wrong with it.
Totally impossible is it as soon as you want to contribute some sort of features (because you reject working on the dirty leftovers or the simple patches that no one gives a f–k for). Working on features is usually the fun part of contributing. You are then directed to put your patches on bgo with comments like “we will have a look at that later” and then it stays there without any feedback for years. They are not interested to get new people helping that project.
Now I hope you may imagine why I don’t have very good words left for GNOME. Sure not everyone is guilty not everyone is an ass or behaves like that, but you need to take my apology that I stopped separating the good ones from the bad ones. I am seriously tired doing this.
Also really frustrating is the heavy abuse inside the GNOME community, those whom we as members have elected behave like patrons on their positions. A lot of my friends whom initially tried contributing to GNOME has been scared away due to bad practices and always repeated attacks (its like a dejavu now). Most normal people never heard about these kinds of practices or can’t imagine that this can really be happening – but sadly from my perspective this is the case.
Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave “GNOME GIRLS” he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren’t great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create “GNOME GIRLS” and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it’s roots and focus for users and users needs.
Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.
That’s why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.
KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It’s easier to build, it’s all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren’t really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.
KDE isn’t much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:
qt-copy arts kdelibs kdebase kdeutils kdenetwork kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdegames kdepim koffice kdesdk kdevelop kdewebdev kdeedu kdetoys kdeartwork
Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don’t need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it’s there.
Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It’s no real integration, just some “hack” which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?
I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.
I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don’t like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.
Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.
To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure bullshit in my opinion. Windows isn’t a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn’t been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don’t decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don’t serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn’t possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it’s the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
When looking at this legendary example picture:
http://img234.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot34ji.jpg
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don’t want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view – they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what’s wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your “Menus & Toolbars” capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It’s a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don’t support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need one I know this too) share the same Toolbar object, if you change global settings then it automatically affect all applications (icons only, text under icons, drag handles etc.) the Toolbar object comes with an toolbar editor (to change icons, text under icons, draghandle, icon size etc.). This speaks about KDE’s great architecture which is pretty well designed.
Again this is just a small example to not make the understanding overwhelming complex. There are many other issues (architectual nature) inside GNOME and it goes on in many areas such as gnome-vfs (which is quite broken, there is no progress information when copying files from FTP (deep directory structures with many files), aborting is nearly impossible and so on (not to speak about many other modules, but FTP is the one I know best) like copying 0 byte files over and so on.
Basic stuff still in stable GNOME that don’t work reliable enough to get serious work done. People always come up with the same BS that GNOME is the light desktop, that it’s so great, clean and so on, that it’s the desktop to get work done. Evince crashing when selecting text, crashing on exit, gnome-print saving documents as *.ps files show other font or save corrupt data and and and.
But this is not the case to say the truth. As a former student of computer and economics science as well as I am now an IT-Project leader I depended on doing stuff for University such as drawing diagrams or UML stuff. I depended (since I was a hardcore GNOMER) on tools like DIA to try getting the work done. But DIA was a poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk (with lost hours of work). My university professor one day looked at me, and asked me whether I painted the use case diagram with a paint program. I told him that I was using DIA and I saw a smile on his face which he left uncommented afterwards.
Even printing doesn’t work reliable in DIA, nor does it work reliable enough in other applications. I had to search for alternatives and landed on KDE using Kivio and Umbrello. These apps surely aren’t the best apps existing, but they gave me more the feeling to get my work done. They worked, felt ok and the printout results was great. Not to mention that my learning curve was minimal since the apps reminded me quite a lot on commercial counterparts found on Microsoft Windows.
Like printing GIF images as black image (totally black paper printout), like not supporting printing more pages on one physical sheet (evince for example) and these things exists in gnome-print/ui and are an elementary thing of the stable gnome releases recently. I wanted to print a document with 120 pages in evince on 4 pages per 1 physical sheet, which should end up in 30 pages of paper. but after I came back from dinner I saw that evince printed it on 120 pages rather than 30 as I was assuming. These things can not be.
Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox. It’s quite frustrating and irritating to get dialogs all the time telling one that something is broken. same applies for the “get emails as soon as you start evolution” bug, specially if you use freemailers with timeout you keep stuck in getting dialogs all the time you start evolution telling one that it can not pop emails due to timeout of the mail isp.
Such things can not be in corporate desktops. If you really consider people and companies who spent a lot of money into their busiens to use GNOME then please make sure these issues don’t exist anymore.
Continuing with my work. As I said I am an IT-Project leader now and need to deal with projects these days. Again using Planner as the only existing GNOME Project management software I ended up in frustrations since Planner is more like a toy than a mature application. Again I had to switch over to KDE to use Task Juggler for this kind of activity, simply for the fact that Task Juggler came quite close to MS Project, offered a lot of features and is free to use.
Same applies in many other areas comparing GNOME with KDE (Rhythmbox vs. amaroK) and so on. We see how quickly KDE applications progress and become mature. Now with better C++ support and more developers and users KDE becomes better and better. The applications are miles ahead of what GNOME has to offer and basic functions like sound, printing, good looks, consistency, integration and interoperability simply works. Sure KDE is far from perfect but chosing between these two desktops KDE simply wins in all areas.
And that’s an important factor. Of course GNOME has the same choice to lead the desktops but sadly it hasn’t and I am not willing to wait years over years only to see GNOME making less steps forward.
KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ? What is the ones disadvantage is the others pet feature. Some people say that KDE is overengineered but I say that GNOME peoples lost focus. I recall when SUN started doing the usability studies some years ago. It didn’t took long and the majority of people magically became all usability experts over night. And good applications became got turned nearly into a productivity barrier (if you ever happen to be productive with GNOME at all) I always find myself fiddlign around in things that simply don’t work. And I keep spending more hours in fixing the issues rather than start using the Desktop to get anything done. Always when you quickly need something you end up being lost on GNOME and its tools.
Another big issues is trying to contribute to GNOME.
Look, when I started to help out GNOME around 1999 or so I defiantely didn’t came and called the people “jerks”. This has been grown out over the long time of six years. I have never been treated like a piece of shit as I was when trying to help GNOME to help shape GNOME, to be part of it. But I had to deal with ignorants, hardheaded people, egoists and a lot of people who are incapable to work together with others.
Even if you as developer want to contribute to GNOME you are under permanent attack, you receive nothing else than huge diffamation, attacks, namecalling, slandering and so on. This drives people away from contributing to GNOME.
Most developers around GNOME are some sort of having found themselves in “groups” they usually block every contribution from outside and usually declare valid and good stuff as stupid, silly or as troll attempt. This is quite frustrating for people who want to contribute. The attempt to contribute something towards GNOME is a very stone way and usually leads to frustrations at the end.
The best thing for contributors is to do the dirt work. The leftovers which the GNOME developers don’t want to work on. Like writing documentations, doing the translations and so on. But as soon as it goes to normal bugfixes for bugs that are known for years these bugreports stay in bgo without attention. If you happen to have some time please head over to bgo and have a look on your own and you see how many bugs have been left there without attention. No comments, not even a feedback why the bug has been rejected or what was wrong with it.
Totally impossible is it as soon as you want to contribute some sort of features (because you reject working on the dirty leftovers or the simple patches that no one gives a f–k for). Working on features is usually the fun part of contributing. You are then directed to put your patches on bgo with comments like “we will have a look at that later” and then it stays there without any feedback for years. They are not interested to get new people helping that project.
Now I hope you may imagine why I don’t have very good words left for GNOME. Sure not everyone is guilty not everyone is an ass or behaves like that, but you need to take my apology that I stopped separating the good ones from the bad ones. I am seriously tired doing this.
Also really frustrating is the heavy abuse inside the GNOME community, those whom we as members have elected behave like patrons on their positions. A lot of my friends whom initially tried contributing to GNOME has been scared away due to bad practices and always repeated attacks (its like a dejavu now). Most normal people never heard about these kinds of practices or can’t imagine that this can really be happening – but sadly from my perspective this is the case.
Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave “GNOME GIRLS” he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren’t great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create “GNOME GIRLS” and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it’s roots and focus for users and users needs.
Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.
That’s why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.
KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It’s easier to build, it’s all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren’t really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.
KDE isn’t much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:
qt-copy arts kdelibs kdebase kdeutils kdenetwork kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdegames kdepim koffice kdesdk kdevelop kdewebdev kdeedu kdetoys kdeartwork
Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don’t need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it’s there.
Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It’s no real integration, just some “hack” which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.
Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?
I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.
I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don’t like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.
Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.
To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure bullshit in my opinion. Windows isn’t a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn’t been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don’t decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.
[snip]GNOME (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)[snip]
I guess you spent some time writing up those 3 big pieces, and you probably like to use it in a way so you feel you get something back for the invested time. But can you please stop re-posting it over and over again, it’s quite annoying.
Even if it sometimes are ontopic and for the most part seems correct, and should not originally have been modded down. That time is past, now it’s nothing more than some annoying canned response or spam. If you really feel the need to reuse the text in discussions here, limit yourself to smaller pieces of it. And only when relevant, please.
wtf is your problem?
I am not responsible for the dummy account reposts. So beware! I reposted the other ones using my IP (as it’s verificable) due to the fact that the initial posts used to be moderated +4 (all three of them) and that lasted for some hours until someone with his fake accounts moderated them down to -4 or so.
After having read this bLog entry:
http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/blog/these_are_awesome
And then followed the Screenshots provided:
http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/images/screenshot-evince-fc4-evince-a…
http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/images/screenshot-evince-debian-evinc…
http://www.jawebada.de/dl/evince-ss.png
I stopped believing that GNOME will ever become corporate ready.
should have been re:gnome. sorry.
Still, wtf is your problem?
GNOME is an awfully broken architecture (which is one part of what I critizise) it also has a bad community of mainly slandering and evil people.
To understand GNOME, you need to split GNOME into two parts. First the part that makes the desktop (which we know good enough doesn’t work good enough to be ready for production) and the second part which (as I mentioned a dozen comments earlier) is full of really insulting people.
If you contribute to GNOME then you are a good person (while there are still people disrespecting your contributions where envy and nepothism is on the daily schedule).
I was told that if I dislike GNOME then I should file in bugreports (as proven above) and then I was told to talk with the developers about the stuff that doesn’t work. You can be sure that in all the years I have tried to do this thing but all I earned was the same ignorance that people have shown here.
a) They talk all the critics to death
b) Or they go the dead friendly way, so friendly that it’s not normal anymore. A wrong thing fo friendlyness in the replies which of course ends immediately after that which wasn’t meant to be serious reply at all only demonstrating that they are no jackasses while replying to you.
c) Critics are usually talked to death by giving dozens of replies to you without any offer for solutions or replies without much value.
d) Those who get elected from the foundation members into the board are usually abusing their powers to diffamate other contributors, who permanently violate the foundation charter’s rules.
e) A bunch of GNOME developers have scared away a lot of fine contributors to the GNOME architecture such as Star (long time artist for GNOME), Dr. Frickle (who initially maintained the old GNOME pages), Mr. Baulig (the guy who initially worked his ass off on libgnome/ui and other parts) and many others.
The GNOME crowd can’t live with critics, they can’t professionally deal with critics and not that they can’t deal with critics, they also need to totally kill off those who criticise. That’s why GNOME makes no real progress, that’s why the majority of stuff feels so broken. Because it’s impossible to set through changes inside GNOME, first of all changes of the foundation board, of the release team and other parts of GNOME because it’s always set by the same people. You can’t have anything changed and thus GNOME is full of stuff that is totally horrible – under control of companies like RedHat and Novell.
Not long ago a good friend of the german GNOME community team had the idea (together with his girlfriend) to open “Gnome Girls” the domain was bought the idea was brought up in the GNOME camp and he was pissed off for this because the GNOME people said that the idea sucked, that it was a bda idea and that something like this was not wanted.
A few months later a few girls who work for RedHat have shown up the scene (no one heard of them before) and they wanted to open (yes you guessed) “Gnome Girls” and something must have happened, it’s like a switch you must have turned in the heads of these people. In no time it was a great idea, the best idea that existsted and they got immediately support. Web space has been given, access to CVS has been given and all the other requirements within hours.
Same for the ordinary user, someone who asks for CVS access or for a mailinglist, webspace etc. will be placed on schedule or simply the request is ignored (as usually) but as soon as a new company joins the GNOME scene the resources are given instantly. The people who give all the resources are so what euphoric, they even blow more sugar in the ass of those companies who join that you need to ask yourself how they could hold all that sugar without getting a shock.
Some newcomer to GNOME asked in the channel, what he has to do to get his contributions accepted as part of GNOME. Now from my personal experience over the years I know that the answer must have been – No chance!. I queried him and told him that he probably had no chance that his contributions get accepted by GNOME. I told him a bit of my personal experiences over the years and how rude and egoistic GNOME developers are and that most of the stuff which makes GNOME today are nepothism software written by their own people. They keep ignoring other stuff even if it’s better software. That’s some sort of selfmarketing they do rather than creating a working desktop.
I am also a bit fedup about all the companies that have recently joined the GNOME foundation board. How comes that every company who shows interest in GNOME shows up as member of the GNOME foundation board ? Hell, every little small user who contributes to GNOME needs to pass the membership application, months passes, you get asked dozen of questions what you have done and then you might be lucky to get accepted (happened for me but I resigned from my foundation membership due to heavy abuse). But how comes all these new companies join in as if they were part of GNOME for the past 6 years or longer ?
GNOME, software only for the users ? Or GNOME, software for directmarketing and cash ? How illusionary!
I’ve not heard so much ranting and moaing since watch dog where they PAY for there products. It amazes me how you people moan so much about GNOME when it’s free, does anyone throw it down your throat and force you to use it?, NO.
Did you buy GNOME with a warrantee and not happy with your product?, NO. I truly think that KDE users and devs are positioning themselfs to claim KDE is the only true one DE for Linux. Even the GNOME devs congratulate KDE and a good job (see planet gnome blogs), now thats friendly. KDE’s lead developer likes to poke fun at GNOME. For thoese of you how think KDE is a more friendly community need to wake up. KDE users just keep poking fun at GNOME to make there own DE look better, even Windows users are friendlier and dont attack it half as much as KDE users.
What makes it worse is that KDE users have gone into overdrive since KDE4 showed up claiming it’s the next best thing to Vista, then after Oxygen icons showed up they attack the Tango project. If you people want to destroy something, try Windows or OS-X, or are they targets you just cannot compete with!
GNOME would suck less if the ground architecture would simply work. That basic things like windows, toolbars, menus would be done in ONE WAY rather than 20 different ways, that tools like Glade should be re-invented properly and not this poor thing that people keep designing their dialogs with and where properties inside the *.glade files are set inproperly and wrong. GNOME would also suck less if it had a global plugins system such as Kioslave or KParts. Bonobo is so what complex that no real documents exists. So instead writing plugins or snapins so other apps inside GNOME can use it. People keep writing new libraries and make all the apps depend on these libraries because its the easier solution for them to solve this task. A plugins pool where apps could grab a working object and register it with their programs would have been a better choice imo.
True that and thanks for following my comments all the years. It’s good to see hat people keep track of what I write and I still stand behind of the things that I wrote. Be it in the past or in the present. But I would have appreciated if you would write your own stuff and your own opinion regarding GNOME and not use other peoples comments to profilate as you’ve been doing atm. It’s easily verificable by the OSN staff who wrote what and that I am not responsible for the dummy_account reposts. So please, if you have something to contribute, be it valid criticism or even if it’s a rant. Do your own shit.
“I am not responsible for the dummy_account reposts.”
Bullshit. I know you already have two accounts here. I bet “dummy_account” is yours too. You are such a loser.
Ali’s other two accounts are called “oGalaxyo” and “Ali Akcaagac”
Sorry dude but you need serious help. But even this worse situation has a good side. A side that I want to make use for the positive. You’ve given a good example of what’s wrong with the GNOME community. Thanks for proving this and thanks for proving that at least this part of the lengthy feedback above is correct. It’s up to the people here to decide whom to believe more. Who wants to be working his ass off for people like you ? Cheers!
Some further words about GNOME and why I think it’s so damn broken and why I believe that contributions alone don’t solve the issues.
The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.
Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.
Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn’t touched for a really long time. There wasn’t even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.
But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it’s quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.
Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like “specifications” as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it’s a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature – and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.
For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say /opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can’t move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.
Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it’s path inside GNOME but still it doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.
Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on ‘dead ideas’ they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get’s lost with playground stuff.
We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.
It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don’t care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.
GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.
Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can’t be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.
It’s also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whole document correctly with correct fonts but as soon as I start printing one page out of it messes the fonts totally up (looks like monotype fonts when printed).
It’s the release team to take care of what they include inside GNOME, if the stuff is still immature or not working properly then it should by all means be avoided for inclusion since it doesn’t help anyone. GNOME is often claimed to be the desktop to get work done. But I often find myself to do more work in fixing stuff around GNOME rather than getting work done. Printing job applications usually ends the way that I switch into console and print over ghostscript using cups rather than trusting gnome-print or evince (which fault this is I don’t know but a confirmed bugreport exists).
As a corporate desktop I urgently require reliable tools and I require these tools today and not – one day. Look DIA, Nautilus, Evolution and many other tools exists for years now and DIA is nowhere to be usable and I often tried giving them a helping hand which I got ugly repsonses from the maintainers.
This does help the corporate idea how ? In no ways does this help anything. I do find the “Tango Project” and “Better Desktop” to be a nice thing but I somehow got the feeling that it’s just a reaction towards the plasma project that KDE offers.
Unfortunately in my opinion the KDE people do make a better figure with what they announce because most of the stuff they do works. Sure, not perfectly and sometimes you have quirks and other issues inside KDE as well but the tools exists to get work done. You don’t need to think about does it print correctly. It simply does. You don’t need to worry about Kivio or Umbrella not working correctly they simply do make a better shape than DIA for example.
KDE may look overwhelming complex and overloaded in the eyes of inexperienced people but in other peoples minds it looks just right and offers all the stuff one really needs without worrying.
I don’t say that these things won’t show up for GNOME one day but I can tell you from personal experiences that developing for GNOME is a nightmare.
As initially said you can easily move a final compiled KDE binary system from one dir to another and have the stuff work perfectly and perfectly find the datafiles. GNOME doesn’t offer that.
Someone ban Ali already.
Maybe they should start by banning you ? Who knows maybe dummy_account is you ? People like you make me sick and it only proves what the lengthy three part comments proves. The GNOME crowd is full of freaking and really insulting people.
Namecalling == true
Insulting == true
Not able to accept critics == true
Not able to deliver a working Desktop == true
<add other stuff here> == true.
Go and contact the OSN staff and have them verify the IP’s used.
Well it’s a GNOME thread, the KDE crowd are here trolling, after all why do we get this in every GNOME thread or news thread.
Talk about name calling, the GNOME crowd can do that because it’s a GNOME thread. So why dont you STFU and go do something else with your sad life. It also seems that GNOME is more of a threat to KDE then i’d realized, funny how KDE users cannot point out good points instead just mod down every positive GNOME post.
Anonymous posting should be banned, then maybe we will get some proper discussion done around here.
“Maybe they should start by banning you”
You are the one that is trolling Ali. If you hate Gnome so much just stop posting here. Just leave us alone and stop with all these posts. Your not accomplishing anything!
FYI and to everyone else. I just dropped Eugenia an email a few seconds ago about the mess caused here and hope she’s going to nuke that dummy_ass account and the guy behind it. Regardless of the comments as for the time being.
> If you hate Gnome so much just stop posting here.
> Just leave us alone and stop with all these posts.
Who are you telling others where to post and where not. Wasn’t open source all about free speach and having an own opinion ?
Ali: you claim GNOME devs are insulting, namecall, not able accept criticism, yet here you are portraying all the same traits you accuse us of having.
Maybe the reason you’ve found GNOME devs react so negatively toward you is because you’ve been insulting toward them even after they’ve tried to work with you to address issues you’ve borught up (in mean and nasty ways).
Stop being such an ass and start treating GNOME devs as human beings if you want to be treated that way.
We all try to do our best, but we can only take so much before we start ignoring you (which you like to portray as us insulting you, namecalling, etc).
You also need to stop with your know-it-all attitude which many of us find insulting and makes it impossible to work with you to solve your issues.
Oh stop playing the nice boy here. How come you read comments about unhappy people everywhere who made the same or similar experiences with the GNOME devteam ? Your reaction is quite laughable and I truly don’t believe that your writing was meant to be honest. Maybe you are an exception from the others, maybe not but I can’t validate this. GNOME has always been quite offensive and rude to their userbase as well to those who tried contributing and this has to be said in the public so people understand it. You people keep pulling all the dirt under the carpet to keep the “white shiny world” around GNOME intact, while in reality it’s not that great as you want to make it sound. Not to speak about the insane marketing practices around GNOME.
> they’ve tried to work with you
While I was taking a shower I thought a bit about your sentence and asked myself whether it is the same way you tried working with people like him:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2001-June/msg00120.htm…
You know who he was/is yes ? And you probably also know what he did for GNOME yes ?
You also happen to know who people like Star (one of the core artists around GNOME during the 1.x to 2.x transition) or Dr. Frickle (IBM guy who happened to maintain some GNOME pages) were ?
The same way you worked together with Eugenia who came up with very good and reasonable proposals ? Hey she’s even more calm than I’m and yet you had big issues dealing with a girl.
http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9933
Hey it was all plasterd over even on the GNOME mailing lists. Well we and probably a lot more are all not matching the GNOME communitys scheme of possible contributors. And we all have social problems that we need to solve.
I also don’t see anything wrong with my initial 3 comments comment (I had to split it due to limitation). Surely I can be blamed to have it cut&pasted over from 1 or 2 other OSN articles before but then it still matches and still is a highly valid comment with many valid reasons and points inside. It had a reason why people spent +4 voting points on ALL THREE comments. It lasted for a couple of hours, got slightly modded down and then up again which is a proof that the so called “rant” is not really a rant but more speaking out of the hearts of people. The reason why specially “my comment” is treated with more care than others is the fact that I am more or less a Renegade who had perfect insight inside GNOME (it had a reason why I hang out in the GNOME irc channels for years) day in, day out.
I saw a lot of people with “social problems” (as you might say) joining the channels, being scared away and never have shown up again, so I perfectly know what’s going on. That’s something you people feel scared. If I was that regular f–king troll you want to make out of me then why do you people spent so much attention specially for my person and specially for my comments (which then within seconds got moderated down to -4 – which is quite questionable).
People who quickly moderate down something usually have something big to hide, they probably dislike the context or feel personal insulted or simply can’t stand constructive critics. That was always a big problem within GNOME. The high egos of developers who play the heroes of open source who can’t really deal with critics. Well as you can read on the blogs they always hype themselves up in high skies but critics, dare who does that.
Anyways you might get a hint out of this.
Waldo Bastian (KDE developer since KDE 1.0):
“I’m very disappointed with the lack of communication within this project.
[…]
Perhaps KDE is not the right project for these people and they should consider working on something which they can do on their own. Appearantly not everyone is able to cooperate in a group.
[…]
f–k you too”
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=97014283820433&w=2
That took 3 seconds to find on Google. Do you want me to find more? Ali stop trolling, KDE is no darling child. People argue, simple as that.
Forgot to post Torben’s response:
“Did I tell to f–k you?
I talked to Eric about the issue. The current documentation
in kspread was hardcoded, the code that used it broke,
the examples were wrong. So you prefer shipping broken code and
wrong documentation because of a message freeze?
Then go ahead. And you are right: I seem to be in the wrong place here.
I can get broken software because of release schedules from Microsoft,
too.
I spend some days of my free time with fixing elementary bugs in kspread.
I am sorry that this affected the translations. I taklked with
other about that. It is not true that I did that without asking anybody.
However, regarding that words you have chosen you do not really
deserve any kind of answer.
Bye
Torben”
More links for fun:
Ali’s paranoia leads to Miguel de Icaza suggesting he “needs help”:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-April/msg002…
Ali isn’t rude… it’s the “community”:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/balsa-list/2001-June/msg00126.html
More insults:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2003-April/msg00163…
He has a mission! (even if it includes telling the gnome devs their project has no future):
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-October/msg00065.html
Way to go, Ali! Show those those idiots at gnome how to keep a community full of friends, puppies, rainbows and green, vast meadows.
I’m sure that after five years continously trolling the project you’ll get to it. Or perhaps you’ll have wasted lots of time just to be remembered as the quintessential troll. Who knows.
links++
No problem, I’ll simply stop posting. I’ll stop trying to think of ways to improve
Amarok. I’ll stop spending time writing about it. I’ll stop posting bugs, wishes or
backtraces. The general attitude of Amarok developers (like in bug #115483) isn’t too
good in my opinion, but now that you’re directly telling me to f–k off, that’s what
I’ll do.
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-bugs-dist&m=113105759218394
Oh come on, it’s quite easy digging up a handful of not really good emails out of the thousands that were written. And it’s not deal making someone look like an ass if you provide only those links that help you achieving that goal – by showing just the negative ones. The amount of good vs. bad emails are in no way compareable or have the same weight.
Look closer to the mailinglists that you provide and you see other people writing similar stuff. Besides that here is the correct LibXML2 comment I made and not the one cut out of context which you happen to have post.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2003-April/msg00140…
And it would probably be an easy thing to dig up the same amount of crap if I knew your name. But then it’s not required if you simply look down the archives of said gnome lists which going back to 1998 or so you find a lot of similar mails and treats written by others.
The point is that even some others here and on other places have reported similar bad experiences with people involved into GNOME, they got sick of it and left. It’s easy to blame the big mistakes and failures of GNOME towards others – and I seriously wonder why for my person there is more attention being given than if someone else writes a comment or opinion about GNOME. I don’t see the difference between someone else saying “gnome sucks” and me saying “gnome sucks” with only the one exception that everyone comes up here whenever I do and only dump down the entire shit towards me.
A bit curious this is but then it’s no wonder that I have and made the same experiences than others. Why don’t you people go and have a conversation with the people mentioned above ? Through the conversations with then you see a lot of similarities and parallels and similar treats to what the handful of people are doing here.
It’s easy to totally crap out someones name because (as you might remember) most GNOME developers have found themselves into “groups” they grouped together to fight exactly all attacks, critics, contructive feedback. They act like gods where they sit and they think they are right and the only correct people outside. It’s clear that when someone criticises GNOME that within a few mins or hours exactly that bunch of developers show up making it look like you are the ass and the cause for everything.
The huge success of KDE here is their community and the different philosophy and their great people. How comes I don’t have these problems with KDE ? How comes nearly everyone treatens me with respect there, we do have good conversations, yes we sometimes even disagree but the entire thing is totally different.
And why ?
Because KDE is successful, it has achieved all the stuff that GNOME is still trying to catch up with. KDE is there and even ahead of what GNOME is talking for – for years. KDE offers the applications that GNOME barely can deliver, KDE offers the solution for enterprise.
How comes that in the KDE thread below (the 3.5 announce) all the GNOME people jumped in and made a hell fest out of it (with a few exceptions who said thank you) everyone else came up with the same old junk like bloat, resource hog, qt license or other stuff. But as soon as someone starts some well defined and valid critics of the GNOME plattform then something totally ticks off in the head of GNOME people and they start using absolutely inacceptable methods only to get rid of those who reported them.
It’s not just fun anymore, it’s insanity. And the ones who clearly deserve visiting a psychatry are those who believe that GNOME already surpassed OSX and Windows. The Open Source movement don’t need such people. Open Source always was about fun, about freedom of speech (Freesoftware), about a culture. Not about marketing, not about competition with Microsoft or Apple – not about having companies keeping a thumb up on something and not about playing some jackass.
Sorry my friends, you can continue blaming all your incapabilities towards one person – me! but said that you are not showing a very good show towards the others. Assuming I am that big ass you want to make out of me, your current behavior and demonstration don’t make you look any different and you only prove that the lengthy comments:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12838&comment_id=67623
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12838&comment_id=67624
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12838&comment_id=67625
Are valid and correct. And regarding that dummy_account asshole. I know it wasn’t me and the OSN staff luckely knows that too.
Not just that, but these tricks are the common methods and dirty under the belt hitting tricks from the GNOME crowd to get rid of people. Instead of giving a constructive feedback they go back use these methods.
You people are quite poor and you should shame about that – but then I only wish and hope that my informations for the people interested might pay off one day. I don’t tell them to not use GNOME but I hope they understand a bit better what’s up with you people. I wrote this stuff from my own experiences made and my own experiences are that there is a big difference between KDE and GNOME not just architecture, but also culture and community.
Cheers!
Funny, the only one comes across as being vindicative and defensive is you.
All you keep doing is repeating the same ole spiel about how nasty and uncooperative the GNOME people are (nice generalization, btw) without providing any shred of evidence. If GNOME is indeed as bad a community as you say obviously it would have completely imploded a long time ago but it hasnt.
The only diffence between someone else saying “gnome sucks” and you saying “gnome sucks” is that you write much longer and more boring tirades.
GNOME use dirty tricks, blah blah blah, they’re all attacking and not accepting feedback, blah blah blah, gnome sucks, blah blah blah, KDE rocks, blah blah blah, KDE is much better at X, blah blah blah.
Get yourself a life and stop this endless whining.
Your arguments are quite wrong and lack a fundamental thing. Till now we only heard stuff like “he is a troll”, “he should visit a doctor”, “he should consult a psychatrist” and permanent moderating down of my comments that initially were all moderated up and basicly got good feedback and didn’t harmed anyone.
The mess started as soon as some of you jumped in making the mess out of it that we see now – before that the entire conversation (up to the first 70 comments or so) was quite ok.
All you did was throwing out accusations like the ones above in my quotes or moderating valid and good comments down. None of you spent the time actually giving constructive feedback, why they got moderated down, what the context was that made you comment them down or even give a constructive feedback showing where the comments were wrong or whatever would be correct and mature to demonstrate a good conversation.
I still can’t see anything wrong with the lengthy comments and none so far complained about them or proven them wrong. Just because it’s so nice on OSNews.com to moderate everything and everyone down doesn’t make the context or comment that got moderated down less valid or false. Just because some of you come up here repeating the quoted nonsense over and over again still doesn’t make it valid or true.
Why don’t you start saying what’s wrong ? Until now all you did was diffamating a person and nothing else. No word, no single complaint of what was written. Can I and the others assume that the context then is correct ? Can we say the stuff found inside is true ? It must be the case otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to hide, nothing for the GNOME people to feel ashamed about. You also kept ignoring where I post about the other people you scared away.
GNOME didn’t imploded. But GNOME stagnated and for me there is no real difference actually. Where is GNOME today ? It can’t stand competition with KDE not even with XFCE anymore (hey XFCE offers yet a better FM than GNOME does). You people sit in the IRC channels hyping each others up to the skies, chocking each others tail and live in the illusionary world that you are the dominating species on open source who offer such a great desktop. The reality is, everyone is bored, no one is trusting the others and everyone expects to be hired by SUN, NOVELL, REDHAT for the poor stuff they supported. Where is GNOME today where it wasn’t 2 years ago ? Dozens of small fixes and simple version bumps, basic stuff still not working properly etc.
The only thing that keeps GNOME still gnoming, is the fact of the agressive Marketing that you people are doing. A Marketing that includes direct attack of KDE – since there are no ground breaking other comments you can give. New people join, from the old developer only 1/3 have remained, others simply disappeared one by one and some new people have taken their place but there is no real progress.
So care to explain why you shift your own failures of the GNOME project towards me ? I only speak out my mind about GNOME and I don’t need to justify to you or anyone else why I do. It’s your freedom to visit OSNews.com or not.
Cheers!
“You people sit in the IRC channels hyping each others up to the skies, chocking each others tail and live in the illusionary world that you are the dominating species on open source who offer such a great desktop.”
I dont use IRC and I dont use GNOME much, actually. I use ROX.
However, when I do use GNOME I find nothing to really complain about. Same goes for KDE. They’re both good
“(Hey XFCE offers yet a better FM than GNOME does)”
Uh, no. XFFM is horrible and I just cant stand the CDE-ishness of XFCE (but that’s just a personal preference).
“You also kept ignoring where I post about the other people you scared away. ”
What on earth are you talking about?
“So care to explain why you shift your own failures of the GNOME project towards me ?”
Since i dont see any huge failures with GNOME I’m not shifting anything to you. Your failures are yours alone.
“I still can’t see anything wrong with the lengthy comments and none so far complained about them or proven them wrong. Just because it’s so nice on OSNews.com to moderate everything and everyone down doesn’t make the context or comment that got moderated down less valid or false. Just because some of you come up here repeating the quoted nonsense over and over again still doesn’t make it valid or true.
Why don’t you start saying what’s wrong ? Until now all you did was diffamating a person and nothing else. No word, no single complaint of what was written. Can I and the others assume that the context then is correct ? Can we say the stuff found inside is true ? It must be the case otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to hide, nothing for the GNOME people to feel ashamed about. You also kept ignoring where I post about the other people you scared away.”
thats because you are like those sick-in-the-head indiviuals who go to town centre to preach that we are all going to die unless we start preaching to god. there’s no point in debating with such blind to reason people because they just won’t listen to reason. they won’t listen because they don’t want to see reason, they just want to see their own bleiefs. YOU are exactly the same. people here have picked every single hole in your notorious swiss cheese ‘arguments’ for years, but still you repeat the same old garbage. what do you expect people to do? people got sick and tired of showing you where you are totally wrong, so why does it need to be repeated every time you write your infamous party piece?
Till now we only heard stuff like “he is a troll”, “he should visit a doctor”, “he should consult a psychatrist”
The point is, it’s true. You have such a paranoia against the gnome community that you think anyone correctly labelling you as a psycho and a troll is a “Gnomie” that proves you are right.
Proof? You even went ballistic on Roberto Alsina, of the KDE project, when he said you were lying:
http://dot.kde.org/1046679118/1046744482/1046746778/1046765834/1046…
His last answer:
“So, Ali, be my guest, and finish the thread. Whatever you say will remain uncontested, even if I have to chop a finger to stop myself.”
Face it: unless you seriously try to become sane, you won’t be liked anywhere.
Cheers!
“Because KDE is successful, it has achieved all the stuff that GNOME is still trying to catch up with. KDE is there and even ahead of what GNOME is talking for – for years. KDE offers the applications that GNOME barely can deliver, KDE offers the solution for enterprise.”
if that were true, organisations would be falling over themselves to use kde instead of picking gnome. in reality, they are all shunning kde in favour of gnome. what does that tell you?
Anonymous (IP: 130.57.22.—) on 2005-12-01 20:06:59 UTC in reply to “RE: Please”
Ali: you claim GNOME devs are insulting, namecall, not able accept criticism, yet here you are portraying all the same traits you accuse us of having.
Like everywhere and everyone in the world every community will have some rude ones in the bunch.
But James Livingston for example on the rhythmbox project has been extremely patient with those in the community posting requests for updates to patches in order to compile the program with features that we want.
The main guy behind Nautilus (Alexander Laarson maybe?) was actually polite when a badly worded subject line of mine to the mailing list caused a flame storm of my own fault I should add.
Outside of the infamous tussle with Eugenia a while back I have been very pleased with the response I have gotten from most (not all but most) of the developers on the major gnome projects.
> I have gotten from most (not all but most) of the developers on the major gnome projects.
“Not all” is quite an interesting part of your reply and only confirms what I tried to explain. You can also be sure that over the past 6 years – through permanent critics and permanent harrassment – a bunch of the GNOME people learned a lesson that it doesn’t help them to be rude to people.
Besides this some elements have left the project for god’s sake and others got a better job and can’t afford acting like an ass anymore. But I can guarantee you that there used to be times (and specially a bunch of people) that you wished all the pestilence existing on earth. But you can also be sure that there’s still a lot of them amongst them.
Maybe we do have a different understanding of where ‘being rude’ starts and where it ends. What could be rude experience for one can be a normal behave for the other. But then I personally made the experience (maybe through misunderstanding of my person, or maybe through bad english or whatever) that a good bunch of the GNOME people are quite rude. Not just that but also the amount of shit they have caused around me as person and then widespread deserves a reaction from my side as well.
So at the end, if no one wants to believe me, then at least take my advise to be careful when it comes in terms of GNOME. Staying away from it is always better than messing around with it.
Besides that Waldo is still working on KDE the other guy probably too. But all the ones I mentioned realized that it’s better to stay away from GNOME – with other words, they don’t work on GNOME anymore.
dear IP: 84.129.215
do you even realise that for any community effort, you get out what you put in? seeing your ‘efforts’ on OSNews, i’m not at all surprised that you have gotten the reaction that you claim have have fomr the gnome (or any other community for that matter). you remind me of these individuals who go through life blaming everyone else but themselves for their own shortcomings.
if i were you, i would either seek professional help from a sympathetic councillor or a psychiatrist. because you are seriously not right in the head.
And I hope he goes for the medical attention before he does something crazy. I mean, all those gratuitous references to karate lessons look worrying considering mails like this one:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-October/msg00059.html
hehe it sounds like Ali has a problem with being small. that can be interpreted any way you like
. he’s obviously quite a tough guy threatening people on mailing lists.
Someone ban Ali already.
I am quite upset about this place and find it embarrassing how people are treated. To set something correct. I wasn’t banned from this place and still I am not as you can see here. For what reason actually ?
I had many discussions with Eugenia in the past and we came to the conclusion that most of the stuff that I keep writing is indeed right but for my personal interest I should stay out of heated conversations because it’s impossible to convince everyone. So far she was right. But then this is a free place after all with the intend of people replying.
Well now coming to the point of what I write. I don’t think that I have to justify myself here, nor do I need to explain why I write things and why not.
About my history, I don’t think I have to justify myself about my history here. You can go back and read the stuff that I have written and I don’t need to feel ashamed about it since most of the stuff written by me only reflect my very personal experiences with GNOME and only reflect my very personal opinion too. People are free to reply on it or simply ignore it.
I don’t have problems with GNOME and their goal for world domination or whatever. But I have something against people wo don’t play fair. You need very good knowledge about GNOME (now not the architecture) but more of the internal function of GNOME as organ to understand what’s going on and what not. And I believe that the majority of the readers here don’t have a gripe of knowledge what’s going on. Why don’t you spent some time investigating into GNOME on your own. Learn the politics and not just the desktop.
“I had many discussions with Eugenia in the past and we came to the conclusion that most of the stuff that I keep writing is indeed right…”
That’s like being complimented by Michael Bay on your movie directing skills.
“About my history, I don’t think I have to justify myself about my history here.”
Yeah, we all seen your nice posts, both here and in other places. Trust me, making yourself look like a total ass is _NOT_ a good thing.
“I don’t have problems with GNOME and their goal for world domination or whatever.”
Right, and the pope is protestant.
Edited 2005-12-02 04:42
Since when osnews is a gnome only place?
Well what do you expect from these GNOME trolls. They are paranoid and won’t accept that I am not dummy_account.
“Well what do you expect from these GNOME trolls. They are paranoid and won’t accept that I am not dummy_account.”
this must be the funniest thing i’ve seen in years! IP 84.129.215, you clot, you forgot to log out of dummy_account!!
You people gonna harvest the fruits for the problems you caused. And you can be sure that I will ne assured in my process to make everyone understand what’s up with GNOME and their community. You people did nearly all to trash my name within the past years. Regardless for all the contributions I gave to GNOME. But then people will read this and understand that I am right. Even if they don’t believe me, they will realize and become careful before helping or trusting the GNOME community. Be it that. I am off for my Karate course now.
“You people did nearly all to trash my name within the past years.”
actually, you trashed your own name. because by writing so much crap, you are your own worst enemy.
Rofl…. you’re pathetic
A rather easy solution to that one, if the OSNews please could post the name of the other accounts “dummy_account” uses plus the Ip he usually troll under. Showing everyone without doubt which clueless looser is behind, and then banning the moron.
Thanks for the words Morty. I do feel sorry somehow but then I know it’s not me. But welcome in the world of GNOME, that’s how it usually works. That’s GNOME! Sad isn’t it?
GNOME is more targeted for the non-expert-end-users because of all this stupid simplification and their new target users. KDE luckely didn’t changed their target audience that’s why many people switched (and still switch) from GNOME to KDE because it offers them what they expect. A seamless consistent and integrated Desktop Environment. Sure it has it’s edges and corners but all in all it’s moving in the REAL right direction. That’s why many people belive that GNOME is redundant these days.
When GNOME saw it’s first light it was targeted for the real powerusers and should offer a free alternative to KDE (which on these days depended on QT (which now is GPL)). While GNOME stagnates because people are more busy talking about what new technology they should assimilate next, the KDE people focused on usability and disciplined programmed a really working Desktop Environment which is superior to all other commerical and F/OSS offerings.
DEAR IP: 84.129.215, Ali, dummy_account, or whatever your f name is:
WHY DO YO KEEP ON REFUSING TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION THAT I’VE POSED TO YOU ON MANY OCCASSIONS WITHOUT A REPLY:
Q: SO THAT PEOPLE KNOW WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM, WHAT WERE THE REASONS FOR YOU CHOOSING TO DEVELOP FOR GNOME RATHER THAN FOR KDE?
Well, I actually wrote it before the dummy_account looser started his spamming, since you had already posted it twice in this tread. Repeating the same long posts gets annoying regardless of their validity. It’s sad when valid on topic commnets get moderated down by losers, but please find another way to respond to it.
Sadly there are several sad losers on this site, but it does not help sinking to their level.
Hopefully the OSNews staff will reveal all the accounts used by dummy_account and the IP he usually troll with, identifying that particular looser at least.
> Well, I actually wrote it since you had already posted it twice in this tread. Repeating
> the same long posts gets annoying regardless of their validity. It’s sad when valid on topic
> commnets get moderated down by losers, but please find another way to respond to it.
You are right, take my apologizes but it’s a shame that a valid constructive correct comment which was moderated +4 in all three parts lasted a few hours and then within seconds got moderated down to -4. As you can see it was intended by some loosers to do this because they can’t stand criticism. It was surely not nice but necessary to repost it.
> Sadly there are several sad losers on this site, but it does not help sinking to
> their level.
You are indeed right, but then what purpose has a news site if you are not allowed to post a valid comment or rather a criticism.
> Hopefully the OSNews staff will reveal all the accounts used by dummy_account and
> the IP he usually troll with, identifying that particular looser at least.
I contacted Eugenia about that abuse and she forwarded my request to the OSN staff. It’s good to know that she’s aware of the problem and it’s also good to know that the OSN staff is involved and investigates into the abuse. And I do feel ok since I know that there are still people with senses outside who seem to understand the problems around GNOME. It’s definately not fun anymore working on GNOME for people like those.
Thanks for the feedback.
Why do you keep answer to that KDE troll? just ignore him if you want to talkig with him go to #kde-promo in irc.kde.org, he is there.
Wow, I just came back from nearly 1.75hrs of Karate training and the insanity is still going on here. People still keeping up with the namecalling efforts even without participation of the accused ones. The GNOME community is laughable but it will pay off at the end with people leaving and more people understanding the problem. I doubt anyone wants to participate to such an highly offensive community. Linux is a community, KDE is a community, XFCE, E and nearly everything else is a community. But GNOME is commercialism and marketing.
Ali, if you keep saying that this spamming is because of the mythical “gnome community”, stop that “dummy_account is not me, stop saying that” attitude. You’re being a huge hypocrite. As always, I’m afraid.
Oh, and stop going to karate and consult a psychology professional. You need it much more.
Hey, Ali!
How’s Project Goneme going? Has it killed Gnome yet?
Gnome is my favorite desktop, but you f–kers are one sick crew.
lmao lmao lmao lmao lmao lmao lmao
Ali got wtfbbqpwned!!!
The thing is that even Firefox 1.5 won’t be in ubuntu for a while