One year ago I wrote a review of Gnome 2. Some people thought I was harsh, others thought I was fair, point is, I always write what I think and surely Gnome 2.0 didn’t have the polish or stability of a .0 release. But one year has passed. Gnome 2.2.1 is out, and I must say one thing: I am starting to get impressed by the effort and the clean interface Gnome 2 is now offering. Update: Screenshots inside.The area where Gnome excels today is in usability. All its preference panels are following the Gnome HIG, so there is great consistency throughout its included apps. A few things could always be designed a bit better, but because of the whole consistent and non-bloat look, it doesn’t make the life of the user any bad.
The absolutely great thing about the HIG on Gnome is that it has won the hearts of all its maintainers, so when people are suggesting applications to become part of the main distribution of Gnome, they are instructed to HIG-ify their applications. It is absolutely imperative that developers read, understand and comply with the HIG as it is for the good of the platform in the long run. I like that. Example of a great-looking application that a non-core developer created with (obviously) lots of care: tsclient. This app is not HIG-compliant, but you can feel the extra thought its developer put upon.
While there is still no menu-editor for Gnome 2 (the Nautilus one doesn’t work with Red Hat Linux 9 by default, and Nautilus is hardly the best way to handle this issue anyway), I must say that the “keep it simple” design of Gnome 2 is what won me over the time. I like simple and to the point UI designs. Bloatware is what I can’t handle for more than 10 minutes. Gnome tries to not include more than 10-12 items per menu, as this is the maximum number users can handle “at a glance” (something that is important when considering a good UI). I believe this is the biggest difference with its rival, KDE. KDE tries to offer any possible and conceivable option and they run in the danger of clutter. Gnome instead tries to have good defaults, fewer options: less is more.
Despite the menu-editing limitation, Gnome 2 is quite flexible and extensible with the use of its taskbars. You can have many different panels and design your panel the way you want to. I wish someone adds an option to the tasklist to not display the name of the open application, but only its icon (and an ALT text when on-mouse-overing) in order to create a panel which “emulates” a dock a-la Mac OS X. Another feature I would like to see in its panel is the ability to have a “Quick Launch” area where all application launcher icons are the half-size of the Gnome menu icon size. This is important for both real screen estate (so I could put two icons vertically – e.g. 2x16x16 icons on a 32-pix panel) and clarity reasons (today it is difficult to distinguish the difference between an icon and the foot menu – they all have the same space between them and the same size with only a small arrow showing that the foot menu might be ‘special’).
Regarding look and feel, Gnome’s default widget look is a very boring one, and maybe one of its weak points. Remember, “defaults matter”, most users stay with the defaults, so these should be attractive and make sense. I would advocate for the creation of a brand new –modern and eye catching, but still comfortable– widget set with a window manager theme where its buttons are well defined and quite large (similar to Bluecurve’s size), as Gnome is at the marketing point that it should consider all kind of users, including newbies (in computers in general with… mouse movement problems 😉 or simply people that require this form of accessibility.
Gnome 2 is much-much more stable than a year ago. I still get crashes with Yelp though sometimes (gtkhtml problems), while Nautilus’ SMB VFS is just not as good as it should have been (and I am not aware of any work done to this recently). But overall, the system is way more stable than older versions and it seems to be getting better with each release.
Speed-wise the DE is not bad either, especially if compiled with the latest GCCs. A Pentium II 500 Mhz is a good machine to run Gnome 2 comfortably, but as always, the faster the better. GTK+ 2.x is much slower than GTK+ 1.x and this fact is especially visible on “heavy” apps like Abiword 1.9.x and Galeon 1.3.x. Another of my hopes is that gtkmm will follow more constant releases and somehow distribute their SDK with Gnome by default, so Gnome can easily attract some C++ developers.
There are two more issues with Gnome, but these are bound to ‘naturally’ get resolved as time goes by: Integration with the underlying OS and the File Open/Save dialog. Some will advocate that it is the distribution’s job to offer tools that will manage the OS (e.g. networking setup panel), but I am not sure where the fine line really is so you can’t say for sure that “this is an app that should come with the DE and this is an app that should come with the OS”. If Gnome or any other DE can offer a solution in a consistent manner, then I am all for using it. Additionally, I don’t like what some distros are doing, they create their own “system settings”, “admin settings” and they also leave there Gnome’s “preferences”. It just doesn’t feel right to have many preferences scattered all over the place in the menu. Gnome should find a way and create a framework for all preferences and with the use of easy to develop addons, distributions could easily add their tools without adding bloat, but only “publishing” their addons to the corresponding category that Gnome has pre-defined. Another integration issue is the easy mounting/unmounting of devices, I want to be able to see all my partitions on the context menus of “Disks” and not just what’s available on fstab and I want mounting to be done automatically just by clicking the name of the partition in the submenu (the system to figure out by itself what kind of partition this is and mount it using the appropriate fs type). Yes, just like how BeOS gracefully does it. As for the file save/open dialog, this should be coming with GTK+ 2.4 in a few months, so hang on!
Also, I wouldn’t mind seeing Gnome “emerging” in their distribution the changes Ximian did for their upcoming Ximian Desktop 2. Most of Ximian’s work would require to be modified to better design principles (see my example here – no, not completely HIG-ified either) but these Ximian advancements have merit and importance and it would be a helpful hand to Gnome and its users. Other third party applications that would be great to join the club would be a HIG-ified version of Balsa or Evolution, Galeon or Epiphany, tsclient, Anjuta2, Bluefish, Gnumeric 2, AbiWord 2, gPDF, Gaim, Totem or a HIG-yfied Xine/mplayer gui, an internet downloader (like GetRight), a PDA/iPod sync suite, an iCal-like app, Gftp and yes, the GIMP itself.
Maybe a Clipboard manager too, but for the love of God, not this thing, but something more in line with the much lighter ClipUP (as a small panel plugin instead of a full app).
Overall, I am optimistic about Gnome’s development as a DE and I believe that with time this huge effort can accomplish an even cleaner and consistent interface throughout its application base for all its users. There is no doubt in mind, the only way is up.
Hey I think you’re getting better at this eugenia
i’m just kidding.
anyway, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. CONSISTENCY AND SIMPLICITY. this is why I dont like kde all that much. I never really liked Gnome either. I might give it a try again. This is exactly the area Apple kills everyone at. Too bad i hate macs.
How come there are so few C++ applications written for gtk? is there still the perception that you can’t write C++ applications for gnome? is gtkmm not up to the task?
I’m not trying to trash Qt, however, I do find it unusual that there is this devide of if you are a C programmer you use gtk+ and if you are a C++ programmer you use qt.
What I am really starting to like is that GNOME and KDE are evolving into two separate schools of interface design. I personally prefer the KDE school, since I like to tweak everything just right, and the more menu options for me the better. Havoc Pennington’s focus on having good defaults has really paid off, though–the GNOME desktop by default looks much more beautiful than KDE, with WELL-DONE anti-aliased fonts, great menubars, beautiful Nautilus icons. GTK2 speed is an issue, and the ugly brown-gray background of its default theme is no good IMHO.
The growing interoperability of GNOME and KDE is good. .desktop files are a good move towards unified menus.
One question though: What is this issue people have with cutting/pasting from GNOME to KDE and vice-versa? I have never had this problem. Have they just not discovered the middle-mouse-click yet?
It is mostly because Gnome back in the day was used primarily by Unix-heads while KDE was “the” desktop DE for newbies. These unix-heads, naturally, prefered C to C++. So with time, this became like the defacto standard, it is mostly a mindshare thingie than a real limitation really.
I’m not exactly a great programmer but my guess is that gtk is in c and kde/qt is in c++. Really though, nothing is stopping someone to code in c++ using the gtk library. I’ve never coded for either so thats all I can add. All i know is the beapi is the best damn c++ api in the world! For me anyway.
>Have they just not discovered the middle-mouse-click yet?
Not everything works that way. For example, copying objects like images. Also, I have seen apps that they won’t respect the middle-mouse-click.
Yes, it is an issue copy/paste interoperability between QT and GTK+, but this is mostly because there is a bug in the application itself rather than the toolkits. However, there is an interesting point arising here: “if the toolkits themeselves allow for this bug to happen so easily to so many bugs, then the toolkits themselves lack this automation and need to be fixed”. Interesting point. 😉
goto gtkmm.sf.net and read up about gtkmm. There is nothing wrong with the kit per-say, I was interested in why there isn’t a move from qt to gtkmm. Are there features missing from it that are available with qt?
RE: Eugenia (IP: —.client.attbi.com)
Well, the issue has plagued X for a long time, however, for me, I simply save the image as a file then import it into the respective document. Some people don’t like it, however, being from the old school of computing, I’ve always done it that way.
I think that this should ideally be implemented on an X level rather than a toolkit one, so the app could just send a (forgive my lack of programming knowledge) X_COPY_MESSAGE or whatever. This might cause problems if X stops being the de facto backend, but the fact that it would ease this for everybody makes up for it, I think.
as is the font rendering
for a software developer, the fatal part is in the backward compatibility area – nobody like to port applications back and forth – M$ knew this too well, as for windows GUI programming, using new features mostly mean dynamically loading a few new APIs or call a few new COM interfaces – they take only days or weeks instead of months or years for the magnitude of gtk1 to gtk2 style porting.
Where we are at GNOME. I would appreciate if GNOME would support DirectFB a bit more (not XDirectFB) this would probably speed up a lot of things and also cause some drawbacks I have already written a couple of emails about this which you can read on your own to get a clue what I am up to.
Here is the email that I wrote to the directfb developers mailinglist some days ago and the response was great, it also contains the 2 links of the mails that I wrote to Desktop devel list for GNOME and the response was good too. I already discussed this with various people in the #gnome, #gnome-de channel and showed them to try DirectFB for at least one time and the results and feedback was impressive. I bet after reading this things you may get impressed as well but it’s also a matter of understanding and taste.
http://www.directfb.org/mailinglists/directfb-dev/2003/06-2003/msg0…
Here the mail watch for the links inside and read that one too.
The look of Gnome DE has improved a lot since version 1.4. I gave Gnome 2.2 a try, but wasn’t really impressed by it in action. First, it’s significantly slower to me than KDE 3.1 (I have Celeron 266 — yes, I know this sucks, but Win98 is pretty responsible on this hardware!). KDE is at least somewhat usable on my machine though I prefer WindowMaker. Theme switching, although not bloated like that in KDE, is nevertheless confusing and illogical. And when it comes to menu editing, this is a complete disaster: why in hell do I have to right-click on an option in submenu to do something with the WHOLE submenu??? I couldn’t figure out how to place a main menu’s submenu on a panel. Is it possible at all? So for now I’m staying with KDE.
software is still a taugh part. OpenOffice ?
…but I don’t like the overall package. I can’t customize the environment like I want. I find KDE easier to use, although I don’t like the bloat in it. However, many apps are far superior (and looks much better) in GNOME (Evolution, Xchat…) than in KDE…
They should try to develop something like KNOME or GDE…
look no further than windows 😎
As impressive as MacOS is on its look and feel, the speed has much to be desired on affordable hardware. Although M$ windows need cover its butt from time to time on the safety side, they rarely fall short on the GUI end.
IMHO, GNOME’s consistency sit right at the file open dialog
stop spreading FUD. Come with real measures, usable benchmarks and similar. The “I think X is slow” is usually plain fud, and in the event that X is somewhat slow, I suggest writing better drivers and toolkits. (which also holds for directfb)
Gnome 2 is a fine desktop. Personally, I prefer KDE, though. I love KDEs set of applications, I believe it’s pretty consistent due to its brilliant modular design (one word: Konqueror) and, well, it’s a matter of taste, too, of course. Anyway, I’m very happy that there is the Gnome project. Having several DEs means each one can specialize a bit, and the fact that Gnome does have a lot of fans (that mostly dislike KDE, too) pretty much proves that its existence is justified. I know many would prefer to see more collaboration and unity in the ranks of open-source developers – less conceptual forks, more focus on single tasks. However, I believe we should embrace diversity – it’s one of the aspects that make open-source such a great thing. There’s clearly enough room for Gnome and KDE.
One thing, though: integration with the underlying operating system. Hmhm. Let’s see. Suppose both KDE and Gnome were to start efforts to produce such tools. There’d be need to have a carefully specified testing environment for the devs. Basically, they would have to either specify an Uber-LSB or create a simple distribution (and I’m not even taking the BSDs into account now; sorry). Should the DE projects actually aim at putting out a reference distribution? Where’s that fine line Eugenia speaks of?
@By Anonymous (IP: —.dsl.lsan03.pacbell.net) – Posted on 2003-06-05 07:29:07
OpenOffice is no product by GNOME and it definately doesn’t show up in the release announcements. Have you seen GNOME 2.2.x or 2.3.x announcement where OpenOffice is a requirement to install GNOME ?
———————————————
@By Anonymous (IP: —.bb.online.no) – Posted on 2003-06-05 07:55:42
You should have read the Mail and the 2 links inside it before replying. It would have explained and answered many things, this includes a list of advantages from DirectFB over XFree86.
I would disagree. Personally, yeah, I agree, default matters. And that’s where KDE slacks. It has a lot of clutter, and places things in the wrong places. It is not because they had too many choice, but rather it is that they didn’t arrange those choices properly.
For example, KControl – it is not because they have too much options. OS 9 had overall less options than OS X (at least that’s the way I see it) but it is still way more cluttered than OS X. Same goes for KControl. The problem is that since KDE 2, nobody seems interested in rearranging stuff. Hello? KDE 2 had way less features than KDE 3.1, therefore a rearrange is really in need. It doesn’t mean you just mix around stuff with no particular reason.
Then there is the menu. I actually seen this being fixed now in the CVS, so in the future, certainly not immediate, KDE would be less cluttered in this regard. The problem with the menus, again, is the lack of arrangement. For example, in Konqueror and KOffice, etc., there are too many menus. So many menus can be merged with another very easily – why it isn’t done? I don’t know. Then the contextual menus put way too much options in there – again, this doesn’t mean that the options are the problem, rather the arrangement of it. Developers should have instead place lesser used options in the main menus, and only keep options that the user would likely to use.
So overall, I can’t say this proves the “less is more” argument, it does prove that every now and then, do some rearrangements.
> the GNOME desktop by default looks much more beautiful than KDE, with WELL-DONE anti-aliased fonts
Gnome propaganda is really laughable sometimes claiming that Gnome is taking as sole advantage of what other projects/the same underlying libraries are providing.
OpenOffice is no product by GNOME and it definately doesn’t show up in the release announcements. Have you seen GNOME 2.2.x or 2.3.x announcement where OpenOffice is a requirement to install GNOME ?
Not limited to OpenOffice.org only, but how useless is GNOME or any desktop for all that matters, without applications? Sure, DirectFB plus GNOME may be nice fast and cool (as well as unstable), but frankly, if it can’t run applications available on X – it is useless.
It’s a bit funny that you linked to that app, both me and Jeff Waugh have written to that guy now asking him to use the HIG button order, but he refuses becuase he wants to remain consistant with the Windows client, NOT the reset of the desktop (he claims he switches between them a lot and it would put him off).
Menu editing is being worked on by Havoc right now. File associations by jrb. Copy and paste of “advanced” data types basically relies upon having their serialization formats standardised over at freedesktop.org – there are lots of little things like that which need doing.
Finally I’d note that Gnome has loads of options, but the more “hard core” ones are only available in GConf, not the UI. No big deal really.
>It’s a bit funny that you linked to that app,
It might not be 100% HIG compliant, but it is a beautiful app, an app that shows that its developer CARES about the looks and usability of his app. Erik should be an example for many OSS devs.
As for the button order, I know that Erik doesn’t want to change that, I talked to him about it already. 😉
Damn troll. I SAID I prefer KDE. OK? Why do GNOME antialiased fonts look better than KDE’s? I don’t know, but they do. Read the comment next time before being a jackass.
> Not limited to OpenOffice.org only, but how useless is GNOME
> or any desktop for all that matters, without applications?
> Sure, DirectFB plus GNOME may be nice fast and cool (as well
> as unstable), but frankly, if it can’t run applications
> available on X – it is useless.
You should read the Link and then the 2 Links inside it. I clearly stated that I don’t want to take away functionality for X. GNOME needs and must continue running under X and it will do this. GTK+ 2.x offers GDK an graphical abstraction library which has many backends, one for X11, one for LinuxFB and in a couple of days it supports DirectFB as well. The majority of GNOME applications (and the ideal way) is told to use GDK calls in favor of X11 calls whenever possible. I only ask the people and developers to take care and use GDK calls whenever possible rather than X11 directcalls and that they should take care for the other backends because many GNOME apps include things this way
#include <gdk/gdkx.h>
Without checking the backend, which imo is an requirement. I needed to change a lot of stuff to
#include <gdk/gdkfb.h>
Now if the maintainer would take care of this and make proper use of GDK then we would both life in a good world. Less issues porting things and so on. I don’t take your rights away from using X11, you should still do this and you don’t even recognize any differences if you want, the same way as before. But I also think that supporting DirectFB as alternative (by paying attention to the GDK backends) make sense for embedded systems, or people that want to try something differently. I recommend you gonna go to
http://www.directfb.org/
and throw an eye on the stuff there and play with it on a different plattform it’s really worth the education. The concerns for OpenOffice is not mine I personally don’t see it as part of the GNOME Desktop (no matter if it’s put in the hood of GNOME or mentioned on their Office page). Hell OpenOffice don’t even use native widgesets, or native GNOME functions from the libraries offered. Maybe this will happen one day but as long this isn’t the case it’s still no excuse for other developers trying to find alternative ways. I rather prefer getting rid of my 150mb xfree installation (on MY system, where 59mb are just fonts) in favor to only 300kb directfb library. This is a total difference. You only boot the kernel and in not ime you are on your desktop. The console and the xserver disappear and merge into one viewing system as you may know from former Amiga times, there is no need to switch between console and x anymore because it’s a different way of showing things. Not to mention the huge Memoryconsumption that you don’t have anymore etc. DirectFB also offers AA font’s through PANGO so you don’t even see a difference. The only major difference you see is true shadow throwing, transparency, speed, less memory consumption.
Ok I now explained a bit more in detail on OSNews what I already wrote in the Links.
“Why do GNOME antialiased fonts look better than KDE’s?”
If the same font looks otherwise it’s a configuration thing.
“As for the button order, I know that Erik doesn’t want to change that, I talked to him about it already. ;-)”
basivally, one man’s choice is forced upon all other users, not much of a difference than one company’s choice ..
I’ve been using GNOME since the 1.0 days, when the focus was on features over all else. I got used to this mentality, and I liked the flexibility GNOME offered. GNOME 2.0 felt lobotomised by comparison, and I was never comfortable with KDE. However, I persevered with GNOME2, and now I must say that I enjoy it very much. It has sensible defaults, so I feel less need for customisation, and it feels much cleaner, like a Mac. One thing I kept from my old GNOME 1.x days is Sawfish, which I like to configure so I can manage my windows via the keyboard. It’s much faster than using the mouse, and I’m sure if implemented well it could be great for accessibility (not everyone can use a mouse well).
“Another feature I would like to see in its panel is the ability to have a “Quick Launch” area where all application launcher icons are the half-size of the Gnome menu icon size.”
I use The Quick Lounge Applet [http://quick-lounge.sourceforge.net/] to do this. I also like to use GNOME Swallow [http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~tetron/technology/swallow/] to ‘appletise’ ordinary programmes like Gkrellm. I think they should be included in GNOME proper.
There is a problem with DirectFB. Mine is that many cards do not support a framebuffer device, and people with NVIDIA cards will have to choose between that and HW OpenGL, and that’s not good (the rivafb driver wreaks havoc on the NVIDIA drivers).
Also, GDK (the Gimp Drawing Kit) has been available before GTK2, they had it in GTK1 as well. GTK passes commands to GDK anyway, and not directly to X.
Yes, I heard of Quick Lounge. But I want this to get integrated to Gnome by default!!
>basivally, one man’s choice is forced upon all other users,
It is his app, his choice. Erik is NOT ignorant of the HIG, it just happens to have his own opinion on a specific matter. The rest of his app is pretty much hig-ified.
Right, that may all be true facts but this is no excuse for NOT investigating into it. As more people understands it as more people may be interested and willing to help. Here is a list of supported Modules for DirectFB and those lack of support are waiting for you to help.
http://www.directfb.org/modules.xml
Also remember that the people working on GTK+ are the same working on DirectFB.
> Also, GDK (the Gimp Drawing Kit) has been available before
> GTK2, they had it in GTK1 as well.
Yes I know this.
> GTK passes commands to GDK anyway, and not directly to X.
Mostly true yes, GTK+ itself and GTK+ only apps are in majority not the issues. I rather speak about the GNOME applications and libraries who use a mixture of GDK and sometimes X11 calls (while these calls sometimes could be avoided). I was playing with compiling GNOME to use DirectFB for quite some time now and hacked around in a handfull libraries only to have them work (function is another thing) and I was able to smoothly compile over the half of GNOME without problems. I only failed with libwnck, metacity and gnome-terminal (not the VTE widget, it works with GDK). Since I failed with libwnck some apps and other modules who depend on libwnck refused to compile as well. But chances are great. See a speedy, clean, less memory eating desktop system in the means of AmigaOS, Mac, BeOS or QNX.
I’m a fan of any system that simultaneously provides more detailed facilities for the system administrator to specify settings and fewer, broader options for the users to tweak. I’m definitely in favour of ruthlessly applied interface guidelines. That’s because I work in an institution that has to provide the tech support for the desktops we offer. Every option the users are given to tweak will lead to another call to the help desk as the user forgets how to set it back or gets confused by the results or it will lead to longer calls as the help desk have to adapt to this particular user’s settings as they try to navigate the user through his or her unique desktop.
Enforced consistency is a life saver for tech support.
Eugenia, there is such thing for Gnome panel,
see http://quick-lounge.sourceforge.net/
best regards,
artb.
There’s no need to discuss during hours and hours, there are facts and opportunities :
1) GNOME applications and libraries /should/have to/ rely on GTK+ for widgets and GDK for drawing and window managements. Calling X apis directly might be considered as a hack and extremely reduces GNOME’s portability.
2) GDK has an experimental directfb backend implementation maintained by Sven (GTK+ guy) and we all sincerely hope that GDK will be ported to directfb in the next 2.4 release.
3) GNOME running over directfb would bring some new features such as real window translucency, very light and fast drawing calls. No need to say it would make much more easyer for Handhelds to run GNOME in the future.
Finally that would not change anything for existing X11 users but would just bring more chances that /existing/new/ people might find with GNOME the Desktop they want.
So interested people who want to help make that happens are encouraged joining #gtk+ channel and discuss that project there.
>goto gtkmm.sf.net and read up about gtkmm. There is nothing wrong
>with the kit per-say, I was interested in why there isn’t a move from qt
> to gtkmm. Are there features missing from it that are available with qt?
Before settling on Qt, I tried using gtk and gtkmm. Using the C API from C+ is a pain since you can’t use a member as function callback (since C++ implicitly passes a ‘this’ pointer), and gtkmm was bordering on unusable (although it’s probably a lot better by now). I see from the gtkmm web page that there are a few applications written with it, but I notice that ‘terraform’ has switched from gtkmm to gtk.
I found Qt to be a revelation – the whole toolkit is consistant, easy to use and well documented. Things like the signal/slot mechanism make it very easy to connect together different objects, and qmake makes makefile handling a doddle. qtdesigner is very good, too 🙂
Some people like to spend all their time arguing about the licence (even though the X version is GPL), but as a programmer I use the toolkit that makes me more productive.
–Jon
DirectFB sounds really cool. It would be really nice to see some official project set up with the aim of porting gnome to DirectFB. The work could then just be fed back into gnome itself then.
The suggestion doesn’t really mean that X11 is obsolete it just means you would be giving a choice of either using DirectFB or X to users. Personally I really couldn’t care less about X applications and would be happy to move over to using something more modern like DirectFB. This isn’t to say that X can’t happily co-exist for users who do want to use it.
What you are proposing is more a suggestion of a pure GTK version of gnome.
It’s not that much that needs to get ported. I was able to compile over 50% without significant issues (from 80-85 modules). Sure there are a bunch of things which ends in blocking further compile. So I tend to say that we can easily work inside the core GNOME tree without requirement of having to set up a new official project. But that’s a vague guessing chances are that we may hit into difficulties here and there. As dolphy told me, the DirectFB GDK backend should have everything needed to get GNOME on it. This way we come a significant step further to simplify the whole Linux installation process, the confusion between Console and XFree and overall pleasurement. There are a lot of benefits that I could tell but I think everyone should at least peek on DirectFB on their own because seeing the benefits is better than getting told. Playing with GTK-DEMO in DirectFB was really a big pleasurement. Don’t forget that there are various other GNU OperatingSystems that load up with Framebuffer on default so the requirements are there already, only the drivers need to get supported more but this is possible over time.
And thanks for your Positive feedback, same thanks goes to Dolphy too
hmm. I was more thinking of a separate group of the gnome project to concentrate on DirectFB compatibility.
Happens to be the project that I worked on last year. In stead of calling it a “thing” you might want to explain what exactly is wrong with it. Also note that the screenshots are not of the current version and the “thing” is now compliant with the HIG.
I also would like to ask not to call this OpenSource/Free Software project which I’ve spend a lot of my free time on (for YOUR using pleasure by the way) a “thing”. I don’t call your website nor your article a “thing” and you’ve probably spend 5 stupid minutes of your time writing it.
I don’t see “you” writing such a “thing”. If you know everything so good … then why are you at this moment not helping the GNOME communitie by writing missing features and applications for that GNOME desktop. I don’t mind taking good critisism .. but what you do is calling it a “thing” and you don’t give any arguments for that… none arguments at all as a matter of fact.
If you cannot be polite then you should not exist at all .. or at least shut your face and don’t write articles nor pretend that you know something about a subject like GNOME or about “things” like GNOME Clipboard Manager. I bet that you have not even tested the current version of GCM.
Funny. looking at philips site i realised something!
in the photos of gentoo developers and gnome developers I see a trend, xtreme sports, bodyart and skaters populate the majority.
what gives?
Eugenia, is that Today Flat from http://www.fewt.com/themes.shtml in your screenshot? 🙂
A year later and no performance improvement whatsoever. I am deeply shocked by the poor quality of the GNOME desktop: GTK+ is the culprit. If GNOME wishes to have a maturity level comparable to QT, then I would encourage a complete rewrite of GTK+ from scratch. Don’t get me wrong, I do like GNOME, but GTK spoils the real GNOME experience. I’ll stick with a snappy KDE desktop for now.
What are you talking about? GNOME is 10x faster than KDE.
I am talking about the lack of 2D peformance in GNOME: Resize widgets and see the result. Qt is so much more snappier than GTK+.
I resize things all day long. This 600 is my primary computer, GNOME 2.2 is my primary desktop. If you are talking about the 2ms delay when resizing a window then I’d argue that you will see the same delay in KDE.
This 600 is my primary computer in my office.
With certain widgets I tend to see sluggish performance, that is > 2ms
. I use a Toshiba P4 laptop with NVidia. Now, my hardware shouldn’t be a problem don’t you think? Resizing windows in KDE is just faster I’m afraid.
“What are you talking about? GNOME is 10x faster than KDE.”
Actually last time I tried to save an email from evolution to some ftp site I was around 100 times faster with kde, because I couldn’t enter a ftp address in evolution’s file dialog. Not very comfortable. Do you realize how easy it is to benchmark systems with disjunktive feature sets in such a way that the one you like more is always faster?
Ok, it’s not worth arguing over. I use GNOME, I also use KDE. There is little difference between them when resizing windows on any of my systems.
Gnome is slower because you can’t FTP from Evolution? What a WEAK argument!
> Eugenia: “Overall, Gnome 2 feels slower…” <
Thank god, I am not the only one who thinks that. My Gentoo box has been configured with CFLAGS=”-mcpu=pentium4 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer”. The 2D performance is just lacking, but don’t tell me that it is just me
Actually i think that’s a very valid argument. If kde didn’t natively support both ftp and sftp in all its file dialogs, my productivity at work woudl be almost halved. None of the files i work on are stored on my machine locally and i would hate to think how painful life would become if i had to use an external program to upload each change i made. Its things like this that stop me from even considering gnome as an alternative.
PS. Don’t bother pointing out that such and such an applicaiton has ftp functionality. I need it everywhere, not just as a hack for one application
To start a desktop war (joke), GNOME needs interoperability between components. To elaborate this with carefully chosen words: When I slam ftp addresses wherever I can, it just needs to work. KDE is just doing that, it gives me a coherent and integrated desktop experience. GNOME is not there yet, I’m sorry.
“Nautilus’ SMB VFS is just not as good as it should have been (and I am not aware of any work done to this recently)”
A lot of rewriting of the SMB method has happened for GNOME 2.4.
“There are two more issues with Gnome, but these are bound to ‘naturally’ get resolved as time goes by: Integration with the underlying OS and the File Open/Save dialog.”
We are currently debating whether to integrate gnome-system-tools into the desktop for GNOME 2.4/2.6. Exactly what will happen is unknown, as yet.
As you’re aware, a new file open/save dialog will be in GTK+ 2.4 and GNOME 2.6.
“Also, I wouldn’t mind seeing Gnome “emerging” in their distribution the changes Ximian did for their upcoming Ximian Desktop 2.”
Ximian patches will go upstream where applicable, they say.
“Other third party applications that would be great to join the club would be a HIG-ified version of Balsa or Evolution, Galeon or Epiphany…”
I think Ximian are aiming to HIGify evo 1.6. Epiphany is meant to be higgy already; any bit that’s not is a bug (http://bugzilla.gnome.org).
“I am optimistic about Gnome’s development as a DE…”
Great 🙂
“There is no doubt in mind, the only way is up.”
We could go down if we tried, too 🙂
Oh, one other thing.
“GTK+ 2.x is much slower than GTK+ 1.x”
I haven’t seen any proof of this, yet. Most GNOME 2 apps are faster for me; some of this is of course optimisation in the app.
Obviously, in the post above, I meant “perceptions” not “performance”. Not woken up yet.
A Menu editor is the only feature missing from Gnome 2.0/2.2
I prefer KDE 3.1.1 because of it’s easy menu editor.
Gnome is faster and set out with some logic in mind.
I hope it is in Gnome 2.4
> Gnome is faster and set out with some logic in mind. <
Weird, so KDE is illogical?
I’ve used Linux for about a year and a half. Back when I started, I did not like Gnome 1.4 at all, so I chose KDE as my DE. I tried Gnome2, liked it more, but still stick with KDE 3.0.
Then I realized that almost all of the apps that I personally prefer — Evolution, gFTP, GAIM, Galeon — were GTK apps, and it was weird running them in KDE. I know you can use Keramik/Geramik or Bluecurve to make them look the same, but some things you can’t change, like the format of the dialog boxes and the file selector thing. It was confusing to have one file selector box open up when running a KDE app and another to open up when running a Gnome app. I like things to be consistent.
So, I decided to try Gnome 2.2 and was really taken by it. Now, I’ve made the switch to Gnome 2.2 and I doubt I’ll ever look back. This is not to bash KDE at all. KDE has lots of very strong points, and is superior to Gnome in many ways, but the simple lines, clean interface, and less-is-more approach to Gnome has won me over. I recently booted into KDE 3.1 and I couldn’t believe how many options there were in the KDE control center thing. Configuration is nice, but WOW! It was confusing.
I definitely think it’s great having both. I love the fact that Linux gives you a choise of many DE’s.
Anyway, I like the way things are progressing in the Gnome camp. People are working hard on improving things and it shows. Hats off to the Gnome guys and gals.
<-:
No but kde’s menu’s is set out with alot of clutter
but you can still edit them with the menu editor.
When gnome has a menu editor i will switch to it.
<-:
No but kde’s menu’s is set out with alot of clutter
but you can still edit them with the menu editor.
When gnome has a menu editor i will switch to it.
I am glad to see Gnome progressing…
HOWEVER, I have been extremely critical lately of Miguel’s lack of focus, in the past year or so on gnome.
Primarily because I feel he is diverting attention and critical resources over the year from Gnome to Mono.
A foolish adventure, in my opinion.
I have told him as much, and he disagrees.
😉
But I feel it is important for Linux to have two desktop initiatives. Right now Kde is simply more technologically advanced than Gnome 2.2.2, especially in the applications areas.
The libraries for Gnome are pretty screwy as well, and advancements into the K Core libs results in application wide affects with very little developer effort. (For example compare the KDE file manager dialog with Gnomes and the K developer tools just don’t have any equal in the Gnome space allowing you to put together KDE apps much more quickly….)
It will take a great deal of time for Gnome to catchup to where KDE is in the applications space and I think if Mono went away we would have covered a lot more ground over the year or so in the desktop and application GNOME areas.
-gc
“basivally, one man’s choice is forced upon all other users, not much of a difference than one company’s choice ..”
I wrote the app. Not my choice forced on everyone. It is the choice of a lot of the users. Not only I, but many of the users of tsclient use both the Windows version and mine. I would rather they feel comfortable with the software they are using and not have to hunt for buttons than use the “GNOME knows better than everyone” button ordering. The HIG is good, but it has some things that are questionable at best and this is one of them. That said, the devel version I have has the buttons in the proper order because I am sick to death of a few whiners pissing and moaning about it all the time. We’ll see if it goes out that way and what the reaction is.
>>We are currently debating whether to integrate gnome-system-tools into the desktop for GNOME 2.4/2.6. Exactly what will happen is unknown, as yet.<<
Yippee, but these tools are WAY too distro-specific. It would be nice if GST were a generic set of tools that could be used on all distros. I want to use them for their ease of use – but since I use LFS, I can’t – without delving into the source code, or trying to figure out on a tool by tool basis which distro most closely matches my setup.
Also, we still need a menu editor. To paraphrase Eugenia, Nautilus just doesn’t cut it.
I have used gtkmm/gnomemm/libglademm and they are some of the cleanest, nicest libraries I have ever worked with. It uses the standard c++ libraries everywhere and is consistant with modern c++ idioms.
I’ve used both and I stay with Gnome and Nautilus.
It has one, gedit. 😉 I really like the Nautilus menu editor, it would have been nice though if RedHat added a redhat-config-menuperms tool though to make it simple to allow users to change menu items.
If GNOME wishes to have a maturity level comparable to QT, then I would encourage a complete rewrite of GTK+ from scratch.
Rewrite from scratch? Tell me you are just trolling.
No, you’re absolutely correct. Eugenia is getting very good at this. A few months ago or whatever it was, she was talking about reducing her involvement in OSNews. I’m glad she hasn’t.
I’m surprised nobody noticed the tunes in the screenshot. I didn’t know Eugenia was a fan of Eugene Chadbourne! Far out!
PLEASE run your articles by an editor first…
“A few things could always be designed a bit better, but because of the whole consistent and non-bloat look, it doesn’t make the life of the user any bad. ”
Any bad?
I think different people have different results on different machines. On my machine (P4 2GHz, 640MB RAM, Gentoo) KDE is faster overall. Kate redraws with absolutely zero flicker or rubber banding. In GEdit, the white text view lags visibly behind the grey window background. A large listview (my 1200 entry JuK filelist) in KDE is an order of magnitude faster than a large listview in GTK+. However, GTK+ apps have an edge in places, namely that applications and menus pop-up faster. Also, highlighting text in mozilla is much faster than highlighting text in Konqueror, but that’s because Konqueror uses a more expensive (but better looking) algorithm to do text highlighting.
the difference in font perception is simple and I think instructive. as has been pointed out, kde and gnome both use the exact same font rendering system these days, so the same font will look the same between the two. But last time I checked, KDE was still using Helvetica as its default font. I mean, for god’s sake, HELVETICA, which on most distros is a butt-ugly bitmap font. Compare with GNOME, for which the default from 2.3 on (maybe 2.2.1, I don’t remember) is the very pretty Bitstream Vera font set. (Before Vera, it at least used a passable, truetype font for default, not a bitmap pile of ugliness). It just goes to show how much impact a simple choice of default can have on performance.
Can people for the love of GOD please stop banging on about the f***ing file save dialog? IT’S OLD NEWS, for Pete’s sake. EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT IT. It’s even mentioned in the article, for crying out loud. You’re not telling anyone anything new, you are adding to the sum total of human wisdom in no way whatsoever. So shut the hell up and just wait for it to be fixed, which is happening. Yeesh.
HOWEVER, I have been extremely critical lately of Miguel’s lack of focus, in the past year or so on gnome.
Primarily because I feel he is diverting attention and critical resources over the year from Gnome to Mono.
Miguel develops for Ximian, not for GNOME. We was the GNOME founder, but has since moved onto Ximian. Mono has very little to do with GNOME at present, and I don’t think Mono will be adopted by GNOME for a very long time, if at all. Ximian developers are paid and equipped by Ximian to develop for Mono. Other people develop for Mono out of their own free will. They want to develop for Mono, not GNOME, KDE or any other project. Who are you to dictate what project they should develop for? Let each person do what he/she wants. That’s what free software is all about.
Gtkmm is one of the only wrappers on the planet that actually supports standard C++ (Modern C++) and QT does not! Gtkmm was difficult to install though because they didn’t say that you had to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, they only talk about PKG_CONFIG_PATH, but here are the setting I had to make in RH 9.0 after installing the approapriate version of glib (which is explained on the Gtkmm website).
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig/:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
I am not highly experienced in Gtk+, but I have began to learn about the widget set, and my initial interpretation is that it is very high quality. Originally it was a flat widget set (Gtk) but was rewritten was a class heirarchy (Gtk+).
Somebody mentioned Be API, well I ‘think’ I heard that Be was an actual object oriented platform, so it would have been organized into frameworks. Obviously such a design, would promote powerful reusable design through inheritance.
Gtkmm is a higher quality wrapper than MFC because Gtk+ is a class heirarchy, but I want to take more time and fully investigate the Gtk+ and Gtkmm libraries before making any strong opinion.
Oh and one more thing. Since Gtkmm does not come preinstalled, I think that’s why more people learn Gtk+, although there is nothing wrong with that, since Gtkmm is a wrapper. The wrapper creates the object oriented domain.
I really wish that Gtkmm did come preinstalled! Why doesn’t it! What a shame.
Although GNOME has certainly matured over the years, and does appeal to me in many ways, the “less is more” philosophy is not entirely convincing. KDE is highly configurable, but many among us are put off by this, which is not necessary: Don’t touch it if you won’t use it. To make my point on DE configurability: “It is better to have it and not to want it, then to want it and not to have it”. GNOME may be very simple and attractive to Joe User in the short run, but what happens when Joe becomes more experienced?
A non-Apple *nix User Environment that wasn’t:
(a) Eye wrenchingly, stomach turningly ugly
(b) Menus/Dialog boxes with options I (Jane User)could actually make sense of
Somebody in Linux land is finally getting it!
Eugenia, I am not sure if you realize this, but there has been much work toward making a good set of themes for gnome, and while defaults are important, it is just as important that “default” alternatives are shipped too. Gnome’s new default widget look is somewhat simplicitic as opposed to being more eye-candy for many reasons, but especially because while it is not the best theme persay, it does fit with the less-is-more philosophy. The Gnome-Themes-Extras package, which is not an official part of Gnome yet though it is in cvs, is also is trying to work on its own set of themes more geared toward the eye-candy idea that a prettier desktop makes work more enjoyable, and is not just aiming toward gtk themes, but whole packs of svg icons including stock icon replacements(open, new, ok, close, cancel, up, down etc.), metacity themes, and gtk themes all unified into what are hoped to be good “Default” looks. Most noteworthy of these is Nuvola, though I think a non-blue-tinted theme would look better, (See Smooth-Eye-Candy on a.g.o for this) and the metacity theme is IMO not a good coice. The Lush theme also shows promise, though again the metacity theme is unfinished, and the stock icons are incomplete and don’t always match yet. I personally think that when these sets are complete and are well designed and integrated as part of Gnome, the initial setup of gnome could ask you wether you prefer a simple clean uncluttered look(the current default) or a more visually apealing look(one of these themes, or a new one designed along similar principles), somewhat like the old Ximian desktop used to try and do.
I just installed Libranet 2.8 which has a fairly stock installation of the latest Gnome.
I am really impressed with the look and consistency of Gnome.
Speed could be better, but it is certainly “good enough” for me (I have a pretty fast machine). I think KDE is actually a little faster, but both seem slow compared to fluxbox (very fast, minimal -too minimal for me- window manager). I personally don’t like many KDE apps, so I use Gnome. I also prefer the Gnome philosophy of 1 app per task.
Stability is ok, but I have run into problems with the panel. It keeps locking up on me when I’m customizing it. In general, it is fine once I’ve configured it. I managed to completely bork gnome (nautilus specifically) through some ill conceived use of Synaptic with Sid (luckily, Libranet is a breeze to reinstall).
My biggest complaint about Gnome is that it feels unfinished (which it is). Menu editing isn’t easy (though it is coming). Theme configuration is easy, but adding new themes has been somewhat problematic (and requires logging in & out for the added theme to become visible?).
Right now, KDE is a lot more polished than Gnome, but both are improving. Gnome seems to be working from the bottom up, KDE seems to go from the top down. I don’t know which is better or worse, but this “competition” is producing some wonderful results.
Actually, I would say on my machine, KDE is more snappier. Remove all the features GNOME doesn’t have but I use, I’m sure it would be faster. The main problem with KDE is C++ linking by GNU stuff. And since that is improving dramatically, so is performance. And unlike GNOME, where performance is the same, if not getting worse, every release, though matter how minor it is, since KDE 2.0, performance increase, though matter how small the margin of difference is.
And still, KDE has far more features than GNOME, and a growing set of therefore. However, one can’t complement KDE developers solely for this achievement – Trolltech has improved their product remarkably since Qt 2.0.
The person who was having problems with window resizing should blame the window manager, not the GTK+2.0 widgets.
The difference between GTK1.2 and GTK2.0 is massive, however there are not a huge number of incompatibilites, but the library really grew a hell of a lot.
The website http://www.gtk.org has very good documentation. Look for good things to come to GNOME in the future.
> then I would encourage a complete rewrite of GTK+ from
> scratch.
Complete rewrites are almost never the answer. You end up wasting years instead of days or months fixing problems. See netscape -> mozilla transistion, gtk 1.2 ->gtk 2.0 etc (although in the gtk case it wasn’t so much a complete rewrite as much as a clean up of the codebase). Joelonsoftware has an excellent article on this topic.
dave
>I wrote the app. Not my choice forced on everyone. It is the
>choice of a lot of the users. Not only I, but many of the
>users of tsclient use both the Windows version and mine. I
>would rather they feel comfortable with the software they are
>using and not have to hunt for buttons than use the “GNOME
>knows better than everyone” button ordering. The HIG is good,
>but it has some things that are questionable at best and this
>is one of them. That said, the devel version I have has the
>buttons in the proper order because I am sick to death of a
>few whiners pissing and moaning about it all the time. We’ll
>see if it goes out that way and what the reaction is.
two things:
1. The gnome button order is basic on sound science and user testing done by apple in the early 80’s. There are clear and very good reasons for the gnome button ordering.
2. If you’re app is meant to be used on windows as well as in gnome, I would distribute two different ui’s. One aimed at windows users and another aimed at gnome users. Following the guidelines set out by the HIG for each desktop is very important.
I am finally begining to figure out Eugenia. I happen to like this article by the way, it shows a depth of knowledge and it offers the GNOME team something to work with, some good advice.
Eugenia is a girl, so it’s obviously highly important that the desktop and applications are based on a strict style guide and are attractive, or pretty (very important). Maybe she should join the GNOME team and be the project manager, because some of the old old Unix guys are obviously color blind and are more concerned about just getting the software out there (out the door) than anything else. We need more female participation in open source project development and this proves it.
I rest my case.
I’m starting to like Gnome more and more over KDE. However, there are some KDE apps that I just can’t live without:
– Konqueror browser and file manager
I still prefer Konq for file handling as I find Nautilus a tad slow on my P3-700. Also, having Konq as a backup browser is always good.
– KMail
KMail is just great; it’s so simple and effective and I’m having a hard time replacing it. Evolution has a great future but not without anti-aliased fonts (I’m on Mdk 9.1) and with all that extra bloat that seems to slow it down so (IMO).
– Kate editor
Kate editor is great; it has a file browser and a file list so I can view a list of my open files without scrolling – you know what I mean screem! It remembers the files I have open between sessions so I don’t have to reload everything and it’s fairly fast.
Otherwise I’m starting to wish there was a Gnome only distro with anti-aliased fonts configured out of the box. I do find Gnome to be a tad slower than KDE but I am starting to admit that I prefer its cleaner look.
> I have been extremely critical lately of Miguel’s lack of focus, in the past year or so on gnome.
You shouldn’t be. Miguel doesn’t work on Gnome anymore. It is not that he is lazy or anything, it was his decision to not work on it anymore. His focus IS mono. Other people have taken over Gnome.
>Is this Today-Flat?
No. it is MC-Today by Filip.
I was a diehard gnome 1.2 and 1.4 user and I abhorred KDE 2.x.
After installing gnome 2.0, I seriously felt like my balls had been chopped off, and I decided to install KDE 3.0 instead. After a while, I got used to KDE, and I loved it. After gnome 2.2 came out, I switched to it completely for a week or so– but I came running back to KDE 3.1 soon after.
I seriously _tried_ to like gnome2, but gnome 1.x and kde 3.x is much better, in my opinion. The only thing gnome2 reminds me of is kde2. They have the same keep-features-you-can-implement-to-help-the-“newbie” mentalty, which I don’t like personally.
My maindesktop, however, is MacOSX now, after I bought a nice g4
I’m using KDE apps in it like kate and kdevelop though.. kate rules! fink is a godsend to install x11 apps in OSX.
? I thought MC-Today used funky button colors, which is what I used as a source for MC-Today Flat. 🙂
It does have the colors. It is just that no window is selected because Gnome’s scrfeenshot tool takes focus.
Gotchya 🙂 FYI, you can eliminate gimp as a screenshot tool. Gnome 2.x has printscreen and alt-printscreen capability. (Incase you didn’t already know.)
Or you could do an Alt + F2 and then:
sleep 5; import -root ~/screenshot.jpg
As you already probably guessed, that 05 seconds are just for house-cleaning before the photo shooting :-). But I´m not sure if it would work in that mini-shell window…
Cheers,
DeadFish Man
The screenshots were taken from Gentoo’s LiveCD on my Mac. There was no import command there, very few tools were included. No Gimp either.
My desktop computer is a Dual Xeon 1.8Ghz, 1GB RAM & a Radeon 8500 128MB. With that type of hardware bloat is a non-issue. I’d be lying if I said I saw any appreciable speed difference between KDE & Gnome. KDE is what initially brought me to Unix and I pretty much hated Gnome until 2.0 hit the street. Now that I’m on 2.2 I have to admit I love it and I can wait for improvements. I still switch back to Blackbox or Windowmaker on occasion but since I think Gnome will eventually “win out” I’ll use it for my main environment.
From the review:
On the one hand:
“I must say that the “keep it simple” design of Gnome 2 is what won me over the time.”
“Bloatware is what I can’t handle for more than 10 minutes.”
“Gnome instead tries to have good defaults, fewer options: less is more.”
On the other:
“While there is still no menu-editor for Gnome 2…..”
“I wish someone adds an option to the tasklist to…..”
“Another feature I would like to see in its panel is…..”
“I want to be able to see all my partitions…..”
“…..and I want mounting to be done automatically…..”
“Maybe a Clipboard manager too…..”
You are completely missing the point.
When I am talking about bloat, I am talking about UI clutter and/or useless options that clutter already long and over-populated pref panels, NOT application selection.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”
That is stupid. Why do people persist in using this statement? What the hell is the point of having cake if you can’t eat it. It makes no sense.
Nice review. But like the review says, the default look of gnome is unappealing. It is sterile and almost gloomy! Where is Everaldo for Gnome???
Sorry, not to pick at tsclient, but it is an example of an Application that looks nice, and may at first glance appear to have followed the HIG specifications, but they’ve missed a few important things.
1. They used a non-standard button ordering scheme at the bottom of the window. See:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/windows.html#defaul…
2. They did not include slipses on buttons which require furthur input (ie: they open a dialog box). See:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/controls.html#contr…
3. They used slider controls on the Display Tab where Radio Buttons (or possibly COmbo Boxes). See:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/controls.html#contr…
4. Their text input controls inconsistently use Left- and Right-aligned labels. See:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/controls.html#contr…
There is also the issue of the “More” and “Less” buttons. The HIG standards are a little unclear on this, however, buttons should produce a clear “Action” and be labelled with imperative verbs. The “More” and “Less” buttons in this case reveal settings that are hidden from the user.
The user should, at a glance, be able to tell that there are “Basic” and “Advanced” settings to the application.
On that note, I would like to say that I really enjoy your articles Eugenia. However, you have a tendancy to make claims without justification or defense of those claims.
Give me a break. I’m sorry I love linux but let’s stop playing catch up and trying to copy almost menu for menu the Windows desktop. It’s not the best or most efficient desktop design, and to copy it isn’t very forward looking or thinking. All this ensures is that Longhorn will come out with many true innovations on the desktop and the Linux community will be stuck with a clunky imitation of something MS had down by the year 2000. Apple’s got a nice desktop going – it’s brighter, more colorful, more interactive feeling, and it’s a solid and stable desktop. If you’re going to copy – copy _that_ instead of windows.
The one thing I hate, hate, hate about GNOME/GTK apps is the button layout in dialog windows. I don’t like the Macintosh button layout — buttons are laid out right justified, right to left, OK button on the right side, Cancel left of the OK button. I’m sorry, but I want the GUI to work the way I read — from left to right.
…unless your language reads from right to left. IMO, the layout should match the language.
What’s your perception about Longhorn?