The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.1 “Daddy Walrus”, is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors. Full details and changelog here.
GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.1
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I still prefer KDE, but GNOME is nice too. Here are a few minor complaints I had against KDE: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=3910
I think GNOME is actually progressing faster than KDE after looking through the change logs. I really wish KDE would take GNOME’s approach and put usabiltiy first and features second.
Check out KDE-LOOK and check out ART.GNOME.org its a perfect example of the 2 DEs. KDE LOok relies on more advanced technology, yet ART.GNOME.org is more usable because the entries are hand picked for one thing.
I also hate the way Konqueror loads folders with images, at first they are all on top of each other and only later wen they are all loaded, are they aligned. In gnome they keep their space and images also have a cool shadow.
I really wish KDE had more developers, it has a much better base (even though documentation on KDE is very poor for developers) and IMO more potential overall.
Usability and lack of good documentationn for developers and users is what drags it down the most. For example check out the innovative search utility in the latest GNOME snapshot and compare it to KDE’s CVS search tool. GNOME’s is much nicer and more elegant IMO.
BTW: Having daily spanshots is a great idea, KDE should do this too like every 2 weeks, that would keep the community more involved.
I’d choose technology…
well I’d choose usability, saving me time and making things more logical. Much better than a load of apps and features I could quote happily do without.
Gnome is going the minimal and usable business route, and it is effective. God knows what KDE is doing, apart from Krystalising everything
i think a balance between usability and technology would be the solution.
[i]i think a balance between usability and technology would be the solution.[i]
I agree. It remains to be seen which one of the two project will reach this balance first. Personally, I’d place my bets on Gnome.
My hopes are high for the interoperability of gnome and kde applications. If they bundle forces, and get beyond the differences, they could jointly progres much faster then by their selves.
I do use gnome, because of the licensing, and because I think it looks pretty good. Although kde seems more stable, i prefer the usability.
just wanted to support gnome a little ..
>> If they bundle forces, and get beyond the differences, they could jointly progres much faster then by their selves.
>>>
In theory yes, in practice, no. Nothing pushes progress as much as competition! When there’s nothing obvious to really compete against, things can sometimes stagnate quickily. Just look at the X people! I agree there should be more interoperability, but the competition should remain. It has done both a lot of good.
I doubt that the two teams will ever trully combine efforts. Allthough II think a certain degree of standardization would be nice
I used to be a KDE user, but I switched over to GNOME with the release of 2.2 and man, I am impressed. I love it. It’s clean, fast (well, ok it’s no fluxbox, but its’ faster than KDE), and well-organized. One they finish porting all the rest of the apps over (Evolution 1.3 looks super sweet), GNOME’s gonna be hard to beat, IMHO.
From some of the comments here it is obvious that kde and gnome do not behave the same on different hardwares, because my experiences has been just the opposite. But as long as you give it both a try before choosing, that’s all anyone can asked.
Alex, on kde if you select cascade, if don’t believe the thing will be all over the place. I use the BII theme; the TAB will move and be shown so that you can always click on it to bring it forward.
If you do not install both but just one at a time, I found kde is faster (my experience only).
I must say Gnome is getting better and better and thats thx to KDE’s competition, That is what is giving fuel to Gnome, w/o KDE Gnome wouldn’t be what it is right now.
And I know Gnome is going to be a lot better experience with the years to come.
in 2.8/3.0. C# will become a language of choice for many GNOME developers, the libraries that are currently in limbo such as ATK will be feature complete and hopefully stable, Evolution 1.4 will be stable, Epiphany will most likely either become the standard or atleast defecto standard browser for the GNOME environment.
Yes, things are looking good, however, seeing a fully usable desktop solution by GNOME is still a good 12months a way minimum.
I actually think GNOME has leapfrogged KDE as of late as the best DE. The difference is, GNOME has become a DE for people who work and need to get it done. KDE seems to be for the tweakers.
I dont think Gnome is better than kde. I think KDEs strongest attribute is the level of integration of all of the applications within KDE. If Gnome catches up more, I hope it spurs KDE to achieve more. Konqueror will be receiving a nice upgrade with some of the features apple developed and there are lots of other great things going on at KDE. As someone mentioned before, the framework is there, the developers arent. I believe that to sell linux in the workplace, you need a desktop environment, not a collection of applications. KDE is closer to this goal than Gnome.
I also hate the way Konqueror loads folders with images, at first they are all on top of each other and only later wen they are all loaded, are they aligned.
You can almost fix this by choosing to have your previews be the same size as your icon size. (inside konquerors preview settings) On my system at least it seems to always add one column too many, which it fixes once it is done loading all the previews. This is why i said almost
The problem I have with KDE on the desktop is that it comes with the second best of everything. Konqueror is almost as good as Mozilla. Kmail not quite as nice as Evolution. Knode second to Pan. Koffice not as good as OpenOffice.org. Noatun not as good as Xine…. Nothing compares to the GIMP. These are my subjective opinions of course!
True you can run all these under KDE, but KDE is a LOT of overhead if you’re going to use these other programs anyway.
You can get beautiful Gnome versions of most of them. And Ximian OpenOffice.org http://www.gnome.org/~michael/XimianOOo/img14.html might be the app that wins the competition for Gnome.
I have to agree. GTK/GNOME applications have been the most outstanding programs on the Linux platfoem as far as the desktop goes. GIMP, XMMS, ROX-Filer, Sylpheed, Sodipodi . . . the list goes on and on
While apps.kde.org is always a big dissappointment and full of pointless duplicates of GTK programs
A few exceptions exist, like Quanta and Scribus, but overall seems behind.
most likely if Qt was totally LGPL and developed by the community GIMP, Evolution, Pan, and many of the GTK programs would be Qt. IMO it is not a question o f which is better, its just the attitude people have about it, I really doubt tbat GTK is better than Qt or that the same programs couldn’t be made with Qt.
Sorry man but to me Kmail and Knode are just out-standing. Kmail is great because is just plain simple to use and a breeze to use as well. Knode is better then Pan when it comes to reading non-binary newsgroups. I will give Pan the binary champ award but to me Knode seems less clutered and a lot nicer to use when reading text based newgroups. Mozilla on the other hand is a great browser but I wouldn’t count out Konqueror just yet. Wait untill they add Apple’s improvements and then judge between the two.
P.S. MPlayer blows XINE out the water when it comes to playing differrent codecs and for DVD playing I would rather use Ogle.
I used to use GNOME 1.4 until a few months ago. I attempted to switch to GNOME 2.0 when it came out, but when I tried it, it felt like if a lot of my major body parts were missing… sooo, I stayed with GNOME 1.4 and waited for GNOME 2.2. When that came out, I once again tried it, and once again, it felt like if a lot of my major body parts were missing.
Sooo. I installed KDE 3.1. It actually felt pretty damn good. I was quite suprised with how far KDE has come. Most of previous experiences with KDE were pretty bad (KDE 2.1.1 was the last time I used KDE.)
It’s quite weird how the roles of the two desktops have reversed. KDE 3.x seems more of an extention of GNOME 1.x and GNOME 2.x seems like an extention of KDE 2.x. GNOME used to be about eyecandy, customizability, and features. Now that’s KDE. KDE used to be about usability, and now that’s GNOME.
I really wish GNOME had decided to stay back to how it was in 1.x. Unfortunatly, havoc and co gained control of the project
I think it would be a much better desktop if it wasn’t so Windows centric. I know that it can be whatever I want it to be just as GNOME can, but it’s not. I have spent a TON of time with BOTH GNOME and KDE, and KDE just doesn’t “do it for me” the way GNOME does. GNOME has holes unfortunately, like it’s lack of the simple things like color schemes.
Use what works for you, like how you would choose a car. I use GNOME 2.2 on top of Gentoo. Gentoo feels good because it accepts my Linux knowledge and I can tweak it to my desires with very little effort; once things are set up, everything runs automagically. Similarly, in GNOME, there’s just enough tweakability to suit me (themes, fonts), but once things are set up it works like a charm — kudos to the GNOME usability standard.
Also like Gentoo, GNOME has the latest greatest features that I need: apps talk to each other via CORBA and has the best apps (Evolution, Epiphany, GAIM, XMMS, etc.).
I find that KDE (and Mac OSX for that matter) are too intrusive visually. If only you could see how wonderfully bland my GNOME desktop is! Also, KDE just doesn’t “feel” right, and I could write reams about how Apple’s user model doesn’t work for me. My favorite interfaces, in addition to current GNOME, are FVWM2 and OS/2. Obviously, GNOME is already a great product, and is on track to be a great platform.
The thing that has always kept me from using Gnome is sloppy window placement. It’s the same thing as MS Windows where windows won’t snap together at all. The other problem is when you open up two termial windows for example. Gnome puts the second one on top of the first one. I don’t know about anyone else, but if I open up two termial windows, I’d like to be able to see both at the same time, otherwise I wouldn’t have openned up another one! Have these bugs been fixed yet? Actually, are they bugs or “features”? Does anyone actually prefer sloppy window placement?
You could use sawfish with gnome 2.2 and it has window-snapping enabled by default, and it also has “smart” window placement that wouldn’t overlap new windows….. however metacity has more themes
I’ve used both gnome and kde in the past, but come a long way recently and is in my opinion now a far better desktop than kde.
I’ve found that when i use gnome (2.2) i just get more work done – which at the end of the day is what’s important to me.
One complaint (to both kde and gnome) I want a decent media mplayer – noatun is awful (why it’s included in KDE i don’t know), and there isn’t really a standard gnome media player right now.
1st, I started on KDE with Mandrake, then to GNOME with RedHat, then back to Mandrake…blah blah blah…now I’m with Gentoo with Gnome 2.2 . The things I hated about KDE reminded me of Windows. I WANT TO CHOOSE MY OWN PROGRAMS! And if I don’t like something, I want to be able to easily remove it. If you install “kde-networking” you get 8 or 9 progs, I don’t want all of them, I only wanted one!
Gnome starts faster. KDE takes for frick’n ever to load ( EVEN WITH PRELINKING).
KDE has GUI bloat.
Gnome is being pushed by the major workplace linux/unix companies (SUN,Redhat…)
GTK2 is sweet!
hmm…thats about it.
can’t wait for 2.4, hopefully, it will return some of the functionality of 1.4
And like everybody else said, it just works
– Install KDE (latest version)
– Adjust font type + other font attributes after doing a long search in the bloated and ugly (I’m referring to this bad looking blue html page here, which doesn’t fit with the Krystalized theme) control center
– Adjust font type + attribs for the desktop
– Adjust font type + attribs for Konqueror
– Adjust font type + attribs for HTML pages
– Adjust font type + attribs for Konsole
– Adjust font type + attribs for whatever other app (editors and stuff)
– etc, etc.
Heck, last week when I tried KDE once again, I’ve spent more than 15 minutes to set all fonts to Bitstream Vera Sans at point size 8.
So that’s what they call flexible?? or a desktop for ‘power users’? Well, I don’t.
Now the same situation in GNOME 2.x:
– Install GNOME 2.x
– Adjust font type + attribs in the quickly found ‘control center’
– Adjust font type + attribs in Epiphany/Galeon for HTML pages
Other apps should inherit their font settings from the base font settings, and that’s what most GNOME apps are doing now (apps like gedit have some options to set custom fonts as well), but KDE doesn’t.
Also, the layout of dialogs in KDE is bad, very bad, and very amateurish.
– Most of them take too much space while that’s not really necessary
– Many controls are too large, for example, there are edit fields that can only have 10 characters, but they are so big that they could easily have at least 50 chars (but usually not possible due to limits)
– Far too many options, many could be combined while keeping the same functionality
– Far too many ‘tabbed’ pages with only a few useless options, could be combined with other pages
– Many dialogs are horizontally stretched way too much..
Last year, many people have been saying that GNOME would have to catch up with KDE.. well, guess what you trolls who were saying that: KDE will have to catch up with GNOME this year
(and it doesn’t necessarily have to be more simple, like GNOME, but there certainly are lots of areas to be improved, especially the usefulness of many options (ie. those font settings) and some real HIG stuff for the dialogs)
KDE might have a nice default theme and brighter icons, but they can’t hide those terrible dialogs with that.
[/rant]
Oh, and ontopic: GO GO GNOME!
I’m a KDE user (can’t stand GNOME 2.x, too simplistic for me) but I generally agree with you. KDE does need to work on the dialogues and the default configuration. However, I don’t think these flaws reduce it’s usability as a power user’s desktop. Firstly, KDE is very malleable. My personal desktop, for example, looks 10x better than the (frankly quite horrible) desktops shipped in pretty much every Linux distro out there. I installed SuSE 8.2 the other day, just for kicks, and I physically recoiled when I saw the XP-ish mess that was the default desktop. Second, the quality of the dialogs just doesn’t bother some people. While it is less asthetically pleasing to have a too-wide dialog box, it really isn’t any less usable than an asthetically pleasing one, at least for me. At this point, I think KDE is in a stronger position. The guts of KDE are solid. The inter-application integration, the framework, the internal consistency is all there. What remains is a polish issue, work on the externals.
Meanwhile, GNOME is in the position that the guts really aren’t solid. There is some basic infrastructure still missing (gstream is still immature, Bonobo isn’t as pervasive as it should be, lot of “creature comfort” features remain to be implemented). While the outside might be cleaner and more elegant, I’d wager it’s going to be easier for KDE to polish the UI than for GNOME to address some of the basic infrastructure issues.
Yeah.. I’ll have to agree with you about KDE’s control panel stuff. However, does GNOME 2.x even allow you to have different fonts for the desktop, file manager stuff, terminal editor, have special fonts for apps, etc..?
GNOME 1.4 sure did. I wish they would have just ported that to gtk2.
GNOME 2.x just reminds me too much of KDE 2.x… it may be polished, but it is both ugly and non-configurable. I’m fairly restrictive about how I want my desktop to look, feel, and act like. KDE 3.x lets me configure everything to how I want.. GNOME 1.x did too.
When GNOME once again allows me to set up the desktop to how I want it to behave, I might switch back, but until then, I’m gonna stay with KDE.
gnome (since 2.0) has these these font settings
applications (this includes nautilus)
desktop
terminal
its a trade off between simplicity and configurability
(IMNSHO I think gnome has it about right – wouldn’t mind an overide feature for specific apps tho)
Most apps that deal with massive text (gedit, balsa, etc.) have options in their own configuration to override Gnome’s font config. Of course, the default is they use Gnome’s font config
>> Second, the quality of the dialogs just doesn’t bother some people. While it is less asthetically pleasing to have a too-wide dialog box, it really isn’t any less usable than an asthetically pleasing one, at least for me.
But it’s just weird.. KDE seems to focus more on things like eye-candy now (apart from the real needed stuff like security et al), but asthetically pleasing dialogs are also some sort of eye-candy..
Well, perhaps it will be solved some day with that OpenHCI stuff?
>> Meanwhile, GNOME is in the position that the guts really aren’t solid. There is some basic infrastructure still missing (gstream is still immature, Bonobo isn’t as pervasive as it should be, lot of “creature comfort” features remain to be implemented). While the outside might be cleaner and more elegant, I’d wager it’s going to be easier for KDE to polish the UI than for GNOME to address some of the basic infrastructure issues.
Well, I’m now going to say something that will shock every fellow GNOME user:
I like the API’s from KDE (while I’m actually a GNOME user).
But as user, I like GNOME better because it feels more solid in many areas and has a better HIG.
Parts of the infrastructure might be missing, but in general, the user experience is way more solid, which is more important to me as user.
Small example: Using GNOME2 and GTK2 apps I can just virtually cut or paste anything and everywhere.
But in Konqueror, I can’t even copy some text on a webpage (using that copy button on the toolbar, there’s no such option in the right click menu) and pasting it somewhere else (this input field, for example), I’ll have to use that weird Klipper for that and the middle mouse button.. (?!)
That doesn’t make things easier when you’ve got to use the middle mouse button in some areas and CTRL+V in other areas.
Also, in those 2 full days (without logging out or rebooting) I’ve been using KDE the last week, it also happened to me that KDE threw me back into the login screen, and for some vague reason my system time was 2 hours earlier as well.
(and I didn’t touch anything when that happened)
And Konqueror (‘stable’ version) crashes really often compared to Epiphany.
So for me, GNOME is more solid (didn’t happen anything weird with it yet, have been using it for almost a year now), even though the infrastructure may not be.
That’s another area for KDE to catch up with GNOME.. it should become more solid, I don’t want to be scared every time I’m pressing a button or whatever that the app or even the complete desktop env might crash on me.
(I’m not saying that GNOME is perfect though, both desktops still have lots of things to add/fix)
>> However, does GNOME 2.x even allow you to have different fonts for the desktop, file manager stuff, terminal editor, have special fonts for apps, etc..?
LIke said above, in applications where it’s useful, like editors, you can often set custom fonts.
It’s just that they inherit their settings from GNOME by default, which is nice and very useful (saves a lot of time) imho.
why do people *say* things like that? it’s just plain idiotic. a “fully usable” “desktop solution” by GNOME is not 12 months away, it happened at least two years ago. see, i’ve been USING it for over a year now. that makes it fully USABLE, because if it wasn’t, people wouldn’t be USING it. sheesh, be more precise with what you say.
for me, gstreamer itself is getting pretty close – the thing though is it’s a framework, which means you need apps to really see how good it is. one that’s definitely worth a look is sound-juicer, which uses a gstreamer pipe to rip CDs. it really shows off the architecture – it rips tracks in a single smooth one-step process that’s much cleaner and faster than the two-stage process used by something like grip, really makes you appreciate what gstreamer is for.
Well, GNOME is nice. But contrary to popular belief, it isn’t all that usable. For example, the “Okay” “cancel/discard” buttons on windows are switched for reasons that really doesn’t justify the change. Being a heavy user of Windows and KDE (like most people in the world, in comparison with obscure OS’s that follow GNOME’s paradigm).
Then there is the open/save dialogs. It is completely *ugh*. Yep, I realize that they are coming up with something new at GTK+, but at the moment, I still see no fruits of it.
And as for speed, I notice, like many, that KDE somehow runs suspiciously slow on older machines than faster machines (not because of the hardware speed difference). But frankly, on all my machines, I hardly noticed the difference. Except maybe KDM vs. GDM (well, that’s why I choose GDM over KDM :-P). And unlike GNOME, every new release of KDE gets faster. GNOME 2 only seems faster because of Nautilus 2, but seems really slow in comparison with GNOME 1.2.X which uses GMC.
One thing people confuse is between clean-out-of-the-box = usability. To me usability is how I can use my desktop in the long term. To me KDE takes the cake. Yes, it needs a overhaul by rearranging[/i] their stuff, but not hide it like GNOME. Besides, I personally prefer GNOME’s look over KDE – it seems more clean. But then again, I can change just about every aspect of the UI without changing a (IIRC) XML file.
Besides, as for me, I much prefer KMail over Evolution. Evolution is more for the Outlook kinda people – people that wants more than a simple mail client. I prefer KMail because of the integration I have with other KDE apps. That’s what I like. Sure, IMAP support is crummy – but then again, I don’t use IMAP :-D.
As for Konqueror vs. Nautilus, to tell the truth, I much prefer the prior. Only because of the fact that Nautilus is just too fancy for me. In addition to the FTP support in Konqueror that I use a lot. Konqueror is much more customizable too (and I don’t mean looks here).
Konqueror vs. Mozilla, I have to say I would prefer the latter if the latter have proper tabs support. But if I have to pick between the two, I would choose Konqueror hands down. Even more so in the future (KDE 3.2) where Safari’s changes have been merged in. But than again, I don’t really like Mozilla or Konqueror all that much… call it “Opera Bias”
Opera, BTW, is based on Qt
Meanwhile as for KDE vs GNOME regarding apps, I would have to side KDE. The reason: stuff like Quanta, KOffice (in comparison with the pathetic GNOME Office), Kopete, Konqueror (vs Nautilus), Kapital, Rekall, etc. And besides, we would only know who would really win in this field when the big players come. And it seems that Qt and Wine is more popular among them (Adobe is a licensee of Qt, for example).
One thing I notice is the inconsistency between GTK apps in comparison with KDE. And the fact that much of the GTK+ apps are still on GTK 1.x doesn’t help either. And of course, all these apps can be runned on KDE, so it really doesn’t matter.
damn the stupid close tags.
Well, GNOME is nice. But contrary to popular belief, it isn’t all that usable. For example, the “Okay” “cancel/discard” buttons on windows are switched for reasons that really doesn’t justify the change. Being a heavy user of Windows and KDE (like most people in the world, in comparison with obscure OS’s that follow GNOME’s paradigm).
You know that this is a flamebait.
Maybe it would have been smarter to go with the mainstream, but I don’t buy that it’s much of a big deal (there are much larger differences between Windows and Linux). If it is for you then ok, bad luck for everyone involved.
And as for speed, I notice, like many, that KDE somehow runs suspiciously slow on older machines than faster machines (not because of the hardware speed difference).
KDE always was like this. Crawling on slow computers but blazingly fast on high-end machines.
But then again, I can change just about every aspect of the UI without changing a (IIRC) XML file.
If you are refering to gconf, you can use gconf editor (<flame>which is almost as userfriendly as kcontrol
</flame>) to change every value there and people are working on some kind of geek tool to conveniently set most interesting options there (I think it’s called “crackpipe” or something atm 
).
In addition to the FTP support in Konqueror
What kind of FTP support? I can’t see any, maybe it’s hidden somewhere? If you mean using FTP servers via an ftp:// URI, then Nautilus can do the same.
Konqueror is much more customizable too (and I don’t mean looks here).
It doesn’t beat Emacs though. It’s a close race.
Kopete
Gaim!
And of course, all these apps can be runned on KDE, so it really doesn’t matter.
Correct, nobody should load a GNOME desktop just because he likes some Gtk/GNOME applications.
use gnustep
And of course, all these apps can be runned on KDE, so it really doesn’t matter.
Have you EVER run a Gnome app on KDE? I guess not. That NASTY Nautilus kills KDesktop! The only way to get the KDE desktop back is to login again!
If you mean using FTP servers via an ftp:// URI, then Nautilus can do the same.
But if you drag-drop a file from FTP onto Gedit, the latter crashes. If you try this with KDE,
“Gaim! it works perfectly.”
Yes. And Opera is my favorite KDE application.
Today I tried Gnome, and I have had more crashes in a few hours than I have had with KDE in months! It is easy to make crashes with Nautilus, just double-click an MP3 without xmms installed. I have not managed to do this with Konqueror.
Have you EVER run a Gnome app on KDE? I guess not. That NASTY Nautilus kills KDesktop! The only way to get the KDE desktop back is to login again!
It doesn’t do this in RedHhat 9.
“Gaim! it works perfectly.”
Yes. And Opera is my favorite KDE application.
Did you try to quote me there?
However, Gaim integrates well into GNOME apart from not using my browser preference automatically.
“Today I tried Gnome, and I have had more crashes in a few hours than I have had with KDE in months! It is easy to make crashes with Nautilus, just double-click an MP3 without xmms installed. I have not managed to do this with Konqueror.”
I even removed xmms to test this… Doubleclicking an mp3 file pops up a dialog telling me that no application is associated with this filetype.
Your installation seems borked.
Darn, forgot something.
But if you drag-drop a file from FTP onto Gedit, the latter crashes.
It loads and displays the file here and it always worked like this for me (since RH 8.0). Your installation seems _really_ borked.
Spark, you are right, since then I have done some dist-upgrades and now it seems to work fine.
BUT I don’t find it very friendly that I must type my password in the location field, as in ftp://user:pass@host.com/ – if I drop such file onto GEdit the password is shown in the GEdit titlebar and thus also in the taskbar.
If you just type ftp://user@host.com/ it complains that the login failed.
On the other hand, KDE provides a nice user/password dialog box.
Oops, I forgot something too.
Choosing Help-Contents in Galeon does not bring any usage information, just a window complaining that gnome-help has crashed.
Until earlier today audio view in Nautilus crashed constantly – selecting it would make nautilus-view-audio crash, it would remember the view setting for the folder, however, thus making it impossible to open the folder anymore.
But now I have luck. Now I get an error that “GStreamer: Could not create gnomevfssrc element” before it crashes.
For the rest the screenshot utility is not very useful – it has no button to take another one, it can’t take one with delay and it can’t only grab the active window.
To screenshot the transparent file selection I had to select Actions-Screenshot and, while the utility was starting, quickly selecting some icons.
Well yes, that’s a good thing for sure (even better would be a “connect to remote server” dialog). Things like this are part of the reason why I think that the KDE desktop is more complete at the moment while G2D is still in heavy development. I just happen to like what’s there already much better.
“Choosing Help-Contents in Galeon does not bring any usage information, just a window complaining that gnome-help has crashed.”
Maybe, I don’t have Galeon installed… I don’t think it’s a yelp thing because it works very reliable AFAICT.
“Until earlier today audio view in Nautilus crashed constantly – selecting it would make nautilus-view-audio crash, it would remember the view setting for the folder, however, thus making it impossible to open the folder anymore.
But now I have luck. Now I get an error that “GStreamer: Could not create gnomevfssrc element” before it crashes.”
GStreamer is still in _very_ heavy development and tricky to get right. Especially when you aren’t using the packages of a stable distribution.
“For the rest the screenshot utility is not very useful – it has no button to take another one, it can’t take one with delay and it can’t only grab the active window.”
Try the printscreen button for a screenshot and alt+printscreen to make a screenshot of the window alone. This works much better than the delayed screenshot hack.
For the screenshots: thank you, I didn’t know that.
The printscreen key isn’t useful? I have not had a SINGLE gnome crash since I upgraded to 2.2.
Sorry to hear GNOME isn’t working out for you, better stick with whatever you used before. I know how tough it is to learn a new way of doing things.
Matrix reloaded Trailer inside Konqueror? No problem (kmplayer-> kpart)
Access files located anywhere: local, over ftp, ssh, sftp: there is no difference. Even the simple kedit is able to edit (and save) remote files (for example over ssh or ftp).
What I mean is this, if you installed FreeBSD and compiled GNOME 2.2.1 and KDE 3.1.1a from the ports, which one would provide the complete experience?
For example, why hasn’t GNOME got a PPP dialer? a decent “GNOME look ‘n feel” Webbrowser? Admitingly, many of these issues are being addressed, however, for an overall user experience “out of the box”, KDE wins.
As for GNOME, contra to your pre-emptive conclusion, I run GNOME on FreeBSD 4.8 and for me, I find it fully functional tat this current stage. For my webbrowser I stripped down Mozilla so that only the webbrowser was compiled and installed, Balsa 2.0.10 for my mail, Pan for my newsgroups and xchat for my chatting program.
I am however not under the grand illusion that GNOME addresses all the users concerns. GNOME needs to become more than a mear shell but a “user experience” that provides not only a shell for interaction but applications that utilise fully the resources made available by the GNOME environment.
Have you EVER run a Gnome app on KDE? I guess not. That NASTY Nautilus kills KDesktop! The only way to get the KDE desktop back is to login again!
No, that’s actually a bug in KDesktop, it doesn’t register itself on the root window correctly using the E root window protocol. It attempts to, but there is a bug in it or something. Fixed now, so upgrade KDE at the problem should be solved (well upgrade to CVS i think).
Matrix reloaded Trailer inside Konqueror? No problem (kmplayer-> kpart)
Nautilus->lumiere->mplayer (using bonobo).
http://www.nongnu.org/lumiere/
Oh, well, then it’s nice it is fixed in KDE.
However, I think I will keep Nautilus – it looks and feels a better file manager than Konqueror.
The reasons for this are the following: Nautilus remembers the window size per folder, so I can make each folder exactly fit within a window. Secondly, in Konqueror I want toolbars when webbrowsing, and no toolbars when doing file management. This is not possible.
And as I can easily drop files from Nautilus on Notaun… and drop Kicker icons on the Nautilus desktop…