A few weeks ago we published an article titled “The Great Mac OS X 10.4 Wish List“, detailing a few personal wishes for the next version of OSX. Later I learned that quite a few Apple engineers read the article and so it felt good that the time spent writing the article was not just a voice in the void. A reader emailed me a few days ago asking me to do the same for other OSes and DEs. So here is my personal wish-list for a future version of Gnome. Please tell us about your own Gnome wish list in the comment section provided.
NOTE: I wrote this article days ago but since then a few of the following wishes have being granted already(!) or they are going to according to the Gnome roadmap.
Nautilus Scripts/Addons
There was a big discussion about this a few months ago in a gnome mailing list but here is a recap: Nautilus supports script addons that apply certain actions on the selected files or on the currently open folder. It also has a MIME backend and so certain actions only happen to the correct files. However, the problem here is that the Gnome Project makes no real usage of this ability. Instead of shipping with 2-3 important addons (e.g. “Open Terminal Here” or “Bulk Rename” or “Compress It”) it has now completely taken out that context submenu if no scripts are installed on the user’s scripts folder. So the problem is now even worse than before, as less and less people even get to know that Nautilus has such support for addons. Addons are a lifesaver and a great feature overall, because they extend the file manager’s abilities “for free”.
The second problem is that third party Gnome developers haven’t realized the importance of creating addons and so all we have are a bunch of bash and perl scripts instead of invoking a well formed API for this sort of job and writing something with a GUI front end (e.g. for the Bulk Rename). Applications like File-Roller add their own menu entries on the Nautilus context menu instead of doing it the right way and placing their entries on an addons submenu, keeping the root submenu clean and without changing too much (depending if something is selected or not). BeOS Tracker supports addons with a clean API and PathFinder too, and we have word that Apple will do so as well for Finder.
Apparently scripts are not the way to go, but a well formed API for this and some GUI apps as in the mockup can extend the usefulness of Nautilus significantly.
Nautilus’ New Spatial Mode
While it is still beta quality at best, the fact that there’s no way to see which folder I’m in at a glance is really bothersome and makes it difficult to be productive with it. Obviously, the usability of the spatial version of Nautilus still needs lots of work and better integration with the non-spatial version. I will wait for 2.6 for a final verdict as to how well this spatial thing can work. On OSX I can’t bear to use it over the default Finder.
A New Modern Theme
Gnome needs a new default theme. Most of the time I find myself using the “Default” Gnome theme, which is simple, fast and up to the point, but it also shows its age. KDE’s new Plastik theme is truly marvelous. It is also simple (I love simplicity), but it does have a great design behind it (see: it is not hideous like Keramik is). Gnome needs to enter the 21st century and create a new theme and also modify GTK+ to support new features that take theming to the next level. I am not talking about yet another mediocre theme like most on art.gnome.org, but something “wow,” something that can draw new users like a magnet and be clean and professional at the same time. First impressions do count and looks too. Unfortunately.
Metacity Features
Older Unix and Linux users love viewports and Metacity has taken this ability away. I don’t personally use that feature but I know others who do. A gConf key to enable this (or on Metacity’s pref panel) might be a good idea as it is a feature that can be useful sometimes, mostly to programmers. Also, I would like to see Metacity have the “use system’s font” ability on its pref panel instead of just in the Gconf Editor, plus I find it important to be enabled by default. The current default metacity font is very small to give the user the notion of “header” or a “title”. Headers and titles are usually bolder and bigger. Metacity’s default isn’t.
Another thing I would like to see is the ability to “glue” the windows at the edges of the monitor (like WinAMP does it, really smooth). I don’t want the ability to stick windows on other windows, only against the corners of the monitor, because if that’s enabled, window movement is very jerky because you get windows stuck all the time among them. Currently you can use the SHIFT key to do all that, but I am only interested in the monitor’s corners which in my opinion makes more sense than having non-smooth window movements.
Also, regarding its theming engine I would like to see an easy way to take 1 or 2 or 3 pixels off (diagonally) from a theme’s corners. Also, I would like the ability to lock the height of a theme because there are cases where I would want to put on the window manager the 16×16 app icon (like on Windows), but the height of the window can vary from installation to installation (depending on the user’s font setting or even because of the default font setting) and then the icon looks squashed and ugly.
I also need a way for Metacity to tell the theme that a window can be resized or not and so the theme would display a dragger widget on the bottom-right of a window or not (not sure if this is implemented).
Session Management
Session management could do better. Please help out.
File Selector
The current alpha version of the new File Selector as seen on GTK+ 2.3.0 is pretty bad (even for beta) and brings nothing new to the plate in terms of ideas and usability. I hope Ximian will have this fixed for Gnome 2.6 properly because breaking it again later won’t be as easy and I don’t want to be stuck with such a file chooser for the next couple of years.
Volume and Showdesktop Icons
Two gripes of mine for any non-Red Hat desktop: using the gnome panel as a single 48pix panel (popular setup for many), results the “Show Desktop” and “Volume” panel plugins to use huge icons. Red Hat has special patches for these and they render as 24×24 and they look good. The default gnome build doesn’t support that and so these huge buttons take a helluva amount of space, plus they look weird being so big.
Development Tools
As much a I prefer Gnome’s usability over any other Unix DE, at the same time I despise GTK+ and its (non-existent) dev tools. Glade is junk, end of story. You go nowhere with such an amateur app. It is as inconsistent and feels like “the Blender” of its kind. Anjuta is the only Gnome IDE but is not even stable in its 2.x branch yet. Gnome lacks a full solution similar to the power of Qt Designer, KDevelop and the kind of integration these have achieved over the years.
Eclipse might be an interesting addition here for Gnome development but it still lacks a GTK+ RAD tool. All these companies backing up Gnome, from Red Hat to Sun and even Novell, they should think more about the dev tools they currently offer, because they are very important for the decision making of new developers migrating from Windows to Linux. If they can’t create one, ‘frobnicate’ Qt Designer to fully support GTK+ code generation.
GTK+
Moreover, I need a faster GTK+ and an easier to use API. GTK+ 1.x was “ok fast” for its time but GTK+ 2.x gives that “slow feeling” even on very fast machines. I can see the window border draw and then I immediately see the content getting drawn etc. Arguably GTK+ 2.x is pretty fast under the hood, but on displaying stuff on screen in a way that feels good and responsive, it does a terrible job. And impressions do matter, even if these are just “impressions”.
Mono & GTK#, gtkmm, pyGtk, gtk-Perl, Ruby-gtk, wxGTK
This wish is on its way to being granted. Murray Cumming is pushing on a “Gnome bindings” release that will allow people to easily use GTK+ bindings and utilize a plethora of Gnome applications that depend on these bindings. This has being a problem so far for many users as installing some of these bindings were not always trivial.
KDE, freedesktop.org, HIG, themes
While this is more an in-progress wish, I will still mention it: it would be great if Gnome had better integration with KDE on 2.8 or 3.0 (and the other way around of course). This would include not only menu integration, but also an *updated* shared HIG (very important, as I get so confused with “Ok” and “Cancel” buttons being reversed on apps) and also themes! I want 2-4 themes to be “shared” and included on the default installations of KDE and Gnome. For example, take Plastic and Keramik from KDE and the “Default” and the “Freecurve” from Gnome and make sure there are versions for both GTK+ and Qt. Each time I am on KDE and I use Plastik, make it so all my Gnome apps loaded under KDE also use the GTK+ version of Plastik. Or when I am on Gnome and I use the “Simple/Default” theme, make it so that all KDE apps now use the equivalent Qt theme, no matter what Qt-config is configured to use originally. I need consistency even if it only extends (for now) to just a few number of themes. KDE does a similar trick via its .gtkrc-kde file, but this is far from an elegant solution, as many times it displays dark selection colors on black text that makes GTK apps unreadable under KDE (depending on the theme).
Nautilus Authentication
Many times I need a way to copy or move a file away from somewhere other than my home directory using Nautilus and instead of telling me that I don’t have the permissions to do that, I want an authentication alert window (a la OS X Finder) to let me enter the root password and do the job. Possibly difficult to implement as it might be a security risk if not done right, but then again, for a desktop setup it is absolutely needed.
Copy/Paste still misbehaves after all these years
Copy/paste still just doesn’t work properly. I cut or copy files off my desktop and try to paste them on another Nautilus window and that would only work half the time. The behavior is random but reproducible on any distro I have tried lately. Quite possibly this is not a Nautilus bug but maybe a more deep one, but the point of the matter is that this inconsistent behavior on many Gnome and KDE apps (not just Nautilus) is just bad. And drag-n-drop should also become better too. Most of the apps don’t support it at all.
Accessibility
While I don’t personally need any accessibility features I recognize that there are others who do. Web Browsers and Email Clients are the apps that most “normal” users use most of the time. Support for blind people should be there, even if the Mozilla toolkit doesn’t support ATK’s accessibility features. Someone should do the engineering for this because Gnome takes pride over its accessibility features and a web browser is maybe the No1 app that also needs it. And Epiphany doesn’t, as far as I know.
GConf Editor
More and more apps are using GConf these days. That’s good. The bad news is that it has become impossible to find stuff in it now that it’s so overpopulated. I need a “search” function there!
Printing, Scanning, Faxing
Ximian has done some good work on the printing UI and the networking connectivity UI and also XSane is pretty useful too. How about some integration to Gnome of all this code and some clean up too for more HIG compliance (especially in the case of XSane)?
Storage
A few months ago we were stunned by the innovation Storage would bring to us, but we haven’t had any news on its development since then. I hope that users will have something solid to play with next year.
Preference Panels, System Integration
The current preference scheme is problematic and the Gnome maintainers don’t want to add more pref panels because they are too many of them. This is primarily a problem of layout and how these are served to the user more than anything else (being a “menu” doesn’t scale). The way Ximian and Apple serve the preference panels to the users should be adopted (or something similar). Instead of throwing in a menu all these little apps, logically place them on a pref window with categories and modularize them. Also, merge keyboard and mouse, merge the UI applets (e.g. theme, gtk prefs, metacity) etc and suddenly you have a clean pref launch window.
Moreover, I would like to see system utilities in that new pref panel order (let distros write their own modules for that new system). Doing a spec of a sort, or via LSB and with agreement with the BSD people and others, provide system panels to modify services, Apache, Samba, users, modules and drivers, hardware configuration etc. etc. I am not suggesting a complete mess like KDE’s KCenter. Keep simplicity and “less is more” in mind always. Integration with the underlying system is what can make a difference today on the Unix DEs.
MIME fixes
The MIME dialogs are currently terrible and difficult to use if the user is not experienced. BeOS had a very-easy-to-understand panel, but thankfully work has started on this department too on Gnome.
Samba on Nautilus
It is broken. It has more problems than it has support for. It really requires a good clean up and proper testing.
Evolution
I was going to ask for Evolution becoming part of Gnome, but my wish was just granted a few days ago. Go for it!
Rhythmbox & Totem
When Rhythmbox becomes a bit more feature-complete I hope it will become part of Gnome. The latest release 0.6.1 is actually pretty good. Two things I want to see doing though: 1. Use the XMMS visualization plugins. Re-inventing the wheel never helped anyone. Re-using existing code is the wise way to go (for Totem too). 2. Integration with iPod & syncing.
Regarding Totem, what I would like to see is to use either Gstreamer or Xine on the fly, depending on which of the two supports the needed codec or what’s installed. Additionally, I want to see Totem 1.0 (when it’s out) be included on Gnome as the standard video player (and Rhythmbox as the music player).
For the formats that Gnome is not allowed to bundle for legal reasons (e.g. .wmv or .mov or region-free dvd playback) I would like Totem to recognize the file format and show an alert to the user “would you like to download from the web these formats and install them?”. If the user answers “yes”, show a license agreement saying that Totem and Gnome are not responsible for any of these user actions, and then download, install and on-the-fly use these new libraries and play the video in question. Something like this could be a breakthrough on the multimedia/video playback usability on Linux. Painlessly is the keyword here.
Gstreamer and Video Editor
When Gstreamer becomes more mature I would like to see a company (Ximian?) create a home video editing application in the realm of power that OOo or Evolution offers. The current video editors on Linux, simply put, they suck. There is definitely space for improvement and innovation on this department on Linux. Come on Novell, buy out Adamation and give us some good home video stuff. Adamation has gone the way of the Dodo, their application is sitting there waiting to be purchased (for cheap), get ported and you get a definite edge over other desktop distros.
Epiphany
Why can’t I still drag-n-drop a link to the URL bar and have it load on that page? Also as a web developer I need the ability to use “no cache” at all, even if I have to use the Gconf editor to set that up. Having complete context menus on forms (e.g. “paste” on a textarea) would be good too. Thankfully, Epiphany is really active on development!
Images, Cameras, PDAs
EoG is a good but basic image viewer. gThumb is in my opinion much more powerful and still simple enough to be used by everyone. I would advocate it to become part of Gnome instead of EoG.
On the same theme, better maintained tools for digital camera capture (see: better than GTKam) and a PDA integrated solution (not only for Palms but for PocketPCs too) would be smashing as well.
Text and Video Messaging Integration
The Gnomemeeting maintainers say that Gnomemeeting is primarily a PC-2-Phone app instead of a casual chatting one and so if this is the case I would advocate the forking of its engine for use with Gaim for the SIP MSN video protocol and maybe even Apple’s iChat one (unfortunately the Yahoo! one is not documented). Also, including Gaim on Gnome by default makes a lot of sense, even if distros include it anyway. Gaim should be integrated more with Gnome and its apps, with or without Dashboard.
Clipboard Utility
I always loved this Clipboard utility, ClipUp (as a gnome-panel plugin as well as a stand-alone app). That can be extra useful on Linux where the clipboard is inconsistent at best. There was a clipboard app for Gnome under construction once but that app was too much trouble for what a simple user will ever need I believe. Something simple and also elegant as ClipUp would rock.
Burning Application
The only good app for burning DVDs and CDs on Linux today is KDE’s K3B. Gnome has XCDRoast and GComBust and a few others, but they don’t cut it (they are unusable by Mac or Windows newcomers). Coaster looks good but it seems abandoned (don’t get fooled by the wrong dates on their homepage, these are a year old) and it doesn’t support DVDs either. The Dropline guy is working on a simple burner app too. Gnome needs a good burning app. A good one, I repeat. (update: read the Gnome roadmap for more info on addresing this problem)
Quick Lounge
In my opinion this gnome-panel add-on should be included by default (after a handful of bugs are fixed), as many users use the Red Hat setup of gnome-panel which is 48pix height. This simply means that people at 800×600 (still more than 30% of the internet users worldwide!) will see most of their horizontal gnome-panel space go the way of the do-do after adding 3-4 icon shortcuts there. Quick Lounge ‘fixes’ this problem by allowing 2 rows of icons to be placed vertically (icons are similar in size to Windows’ quick launch area). This is a good workaround for small resolutions and practical enough and desirable even for me who I am mostly on 1600×1200 or 1280×1024. You can never have too much mustard in a french salad or screen space.
Gnome Office
I like both Abiword and Gnumeric, but putting such apps together and releasing them as “office”, I would expect better integration between them. For example, I would need to be able to copy/paste a gnumeric chart or sheet on AbiWord. Also, adding gLabels 2.0 to the office package when it is released would be great too.
Has anybody filled a bug on bugzilla about this nautilus authentication thing? Seems everybody agrees nautilus should have that (and as far is i know, they aren’t implementing that yet, which is a shame).
Victor.
There is no point talking about “Yes, No, Cancel” ordering in GNOME, because our goal is to *not use* these non-specific terms.
Well, read Yes as ‘doing the default and confirming the implied action’ and no as rejecting it and such. We’re just simplying language for the sake of conversation.
“Simplifying the language for the sake of the conversation” doesn’t help when it actually changes the debate, particularly for onlookers. You won’t believe the number of times we’ve had to re-explain this because people thought they could describe it with “Yes, No, Cancel”. We’re *very specifically* moving away from those kinds of incomprehensible dialogues. 🙂
See gnome-keyring and the vfs-daemon. It will be fixed in 2.6, as well as giving us a number of el-neat-o features. 🙂
More and more people are wanting their favorite applications to integrate tightly with both desktops, but at the moment that’s near impossible. What’s a developer to do who has created a popular program only to discover that half his users are Gnome users and half his users KDE users?
An unconventional thought just came to me, which could save the Linux world… Having followed user arguments about Gnome vs. KDE for quite a while now, it seems conclusive: KDE has more advanced underlying technologies, while Gnome has a better-developed UI. Thus, my idea is compromise on both sides: Gnome (lets say, in version 3.0) switches from GTK+ to Qt as its developing environment, thus solving the problem of developer tools, network transparency, extensible programming language support, and speed. KDE, then, should adopt Gnome’s HIG. Sure, it can keep its desktop as unique as possible, but where applications are concerned there should be a standard.
This would lead to a consolidation of Linux applications, an easier time for developers and a better experience for end users.
I should also mention that in an interview, Novell’s 2nd-in-command (I forget his name) targeted unified development tools for Gnome and KDE as a main goal for the near future.
And PLEASE ! include a “kepp on top” feature in metacity.
If u think, that’s tooo geaky (and I really DON’T think so), than include an window for that in the control panel. Such a thing :
WindowManager To use :
Metacity
Other : …… (put there what u want)
(if Metacity hasn’t been selected what is written under that is in grey : else u can configure it)
[X] Option “Keep On Top” available in metacity menu
[X] Option “Keep On Bottom” available in metacity menu
[X] Option “Omipresent” available in metacity menu
[12] size fonts for metacty
… and other option. Keep it simple by default, but I WANT my keep on top feature. And dont say me to use the kay combinition for that because
1) It’s not documented. Nobody know from that
2) It’s buggy !!!!
3) they are also people who likes to use the mouse. If i would’nt do that I would stick with mc instead of nautilus.
Hi, two people has requested this wishes.
Ok, you have them!
For Metacity shortcuts you only need to edit gconf configuration via gconf-editor and then go to “apps”->”metacity” and there you can set you’re preferred shortcuts, I have: Win+E -> Evolution, Win + B -> Epiphany (browser), …
For Starting Apps in predefined Workspaces, you should use a program called Devilspie, which uses a XML configuration to “hook” windows when they’re are launched and then do actions about it like, maximizing, moving to a workspace, …
http://alts.homelinux.net/
“Read the HIG – dialogue box buttons need to describe what you’re going to do, not answer a question.”
Well, they do answer a question. Seriously, I don’t know how buttons can avoid answering a question, when the dialog does ask a qustion. The word “dialog” means “conversation”: the application asks questions via dialogs and the user answers them via clicking buttons.
Some examples:
| File “testme.pl” is an executable text file.
| Do you want to run it or view it?
| [Run in a terminal][View][Cancel][Run]
Does it ask a question? Yes. Do the buttons [Run] and [View] provide answers for that question? Yes.
| File “testme.txt” has been changed.
| Do you want to save it before quitting?
| [Don’t save][Cancel][Save]
Do the buttons [Save] and [Don’t save] mean exactly the same as [Yes] and [No]? Yes. They just have more descriptive labels. The sense is not changed by renaming buttons from “Yes” to “Yes I wanna save the file testme.txt” or “Save”.
Please compare these two vending machines in terms of usability:
Koffee TM: “How do you like your coffee?”
[Black]
[White]
[Mocha]
[Cappuccino]
[Cancel]
[No suggar]
[Extra suggar]
Coffee Gnome TM: “Do you like black coffee?”
[No suggar]
[Extra suggar]
[Cappuccino]
[Mocha]
[White]
[Cancel]
[Black]
From the second one I can’t even tell wheather I can have cappuchino with extra suggar. Well, there is definitely more chance I will hit the cancel button to collect my money back…
Balsa is an stand-alone email client.
See gnome-keyring and the vfs-daemon. It will be fixed in 2.6, as well as giving us a number of el-neat-o features. 🙂
Are we talking about the thing? Getting the right permissions when trying to access a local file (like /etc/foobar)?
I also want a knome but that’s not going to happen.
Spark, I’m talking about auth caching in gnome-vfs for remote filesystems. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with reading the correct permissions, local or remote.
Last time I played with gnome, metacity could not center windows as they display when first created, and I always found myself moving the window to the center, I hate looking at a window that is up in the left hand corner of the screen. So I use KDE basicly because of that.
But I also use KDE because of Konq’s incredible integeration with SSH and SFT using fish.
I can browse around other servers and workstations that I have access to just like it was a local file system, and all the mime types work. Gnome and KDE should join forces and combine the best of both worlds into a new Desktop. Do we really need two major ones?
Yes reading the permissions is not the problem.
The problem is that you can’t do anything with those files unless you have started Nautilus or even GNOME as root. I do believe that this is a really critical problem if you have to tell every home user that he has to use the terminal to access some files on his very own computer. 
While it usually shouldn’t be neccessary to edit such files, it certainly shouldn’t be impossible either.
That’s what this paragraph of the article was about and what I agree with. There is no Linux desktop yet which can do this, but OS X does.
Thats the only thing that keeps me using Konqueror (from gnome). Also add scroll wheel virtual desktop switching like in Fluxbox and KDE 3.2.
I wish gnome-vfs didn’t suck. I mean in kde I can open files right out of konqueror over ftp,smb,sftp edit them click save and bam life is good. Also it auto asks for the proper authentication credentials every time. Does this happen in gnome? HELL NO!!!! If I even want to access a remote resource I have to type in urls lie : user:pass@host
then I have to copy the file to the desktop then copy it back. What a pain in the ass. If nautilus worked liked konqueror I would never use kde again.
BTW, the html renderer example is entirely bogus.
GNOME has two HTML rendering engines because one of them is capable of editing and one is not. It’s unfortunate that they forked in this way, but that’s the way it happened.
KDE has one HTML rendering engine. It is not capable of editing. As a result KMail is not able to do HTML emails, whereas Evolution can.
So, while Gnome has a roundabout way of getting these features, it’s still a lot better than not having them at all.
The others are also mostly bogus. You’re a smart guy Rayiner, but please choose your examples more carefully in future. aRts is not a “powerful, componentized media framework”, it’s a glorified sound server. Adding video is/was a painful hack – there’s a reason KDE are thinking of dropping it in favour of GStreamer in KDE 4.
KDE doesn’t have anything that would resemble a traditional “component architecture” – typically such things are language neutral for instance. KParts is merely a glorified C++ class loader.
Finally, much of its architecture is going to be reinvented anyway, but in a KDE and GNOME neutral fashion. For instance Waldo Bastien wants to do a new VFS system.
Hi Eugenia,
nice article. Many of the things I share.
I’d add this too:
Maybe it’s my fault but I have got an 800×600 15″ monitor.
Sometimes I cannot use PEARL applications because they are thought for an higher resolution ie DVDRip. It would be nice if gnome would allow the user to move the window outside the screen borders, to get rid of the OK and Apply buttons that are always out of sight and click….
– Regards
– Pashs
True network transparancy (see KDE).
Better printing support (see KDE).
More “efficient” nautilus modes (see konqueror).
Mouse Gestures and more (see KDE-3.2/khotkeys).
Ability to easily change ui colours (see KDE).
More tools for configuring system related settings that might need root password.
Rhythmbox with support for changing songs by scrolling with the mousewheel on the system tray icon (see KDE-3.2/juk).
“More tools for configuring system related settings that might need root password.”
See gnome-system-tools
Hi,
I just read your article and as the UI designer and coder of Coaster, I would like to let everyone know that Coaster IS NOT DEAD. Harshy has been busy with school and recently got very ill, so updates to the website have been few and far between. Right now, we are waiting for libburn ( http://icculus.org/burn ) to stabalize so we can get a file format down. Anyway, if any of you would like to know more, join #coaster on irc.gimp.net and your questions can be answered there. Thanks for the good article
.
-Bryan
On PlanetGnome http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/planetgnome/
So the every amusing OSNews is running a GNOME Wishlist. Sigh. Where do I start?
Nautilus Scripts/Addons
Nautilus 2.6 will support funky new plugins, with a clean API and decent menu merging. I though Eugenia was keeping up with Nautilus development, she certainly posts on nautilus-list now and again.
Spatial Mode
It’s not finished — either help make it totally rock by commenting/fixing/patching, or wait until is it finished.
Metacity Features
The standard rant about “viewports” and “workspaces”. Again. Jesus people, ask for a feature and not the name for a subset of available features that you have used before. Please. I’m about to ask God to extend his kitten-killing to Metacity… For glueing windows to the corner of the screen… well, press shift once you are close to the corner and it will magically glue itself, without snapping to the windows it sees en route.
File Selector
Eugenia’s comments are pretty useless: “…is pretty bad”. Not really a comprehensive UI review, but thanks anyway. But that’s not what I’m confused about — I’m confused about the number of people who think that the “Frobnicate this file” check box in Frederico’s example screenshot is part of the default UI! Please engage brain before posting. What would “frobnicating” do to a document I opened in gedit? In galeon? Did you ever consider the possibility that this widget is an example of an extra widget the developer can add to the file selector?
Volume and Showdesktop Icons
Honestly, compared against some of the bugs in GNOME this is laughable. Extract the patch from Red Hat, and file it as a bug upstream. It will probably be applied. Not Hard Work.
Development Tools
“Glade is junk, end of story” — Eugenia. Right. Personally I consider Glade to be a wonderful interface designer, and makes coding GTK+ interfaces trivial. I hope this isn’t referring to the “Generate Source” button in Glade, which is generally considered to be A Bad Idea when using C.
Personally, I hope that Eclipse’s C support will mature and someone integrates Glade somehow, even if it is just a button to launch the binary. But I’m happy with Glade + libglade + xemacs.
Copy/Paste still misbehaves after all these years
File bugs! There is no fundamental reason why copy and paste shouldn’t work, as is shown by the recent gaim hacking to copy right text to/from the gaim chat window into the Evolution composer.
GConf Editor
A search button for gconf-editor could be handy, but generally tried looking in /apps/[app-name]?
Samba on Nautilus
GNOME 2.4 I believe had a new smb: implementation, and in GNOME 2.6 it will rock even more.
Rhythmbox and Totem
“Use the XMMS visualization plugins” — not possible. It is impossible to link GTK+ 1.2 and GTK+ 2.x code in the same binary.
“Totem … use either Gstreamer or Xine on the fly” — why? I’d say that everything GStreamer can play, Xine can play. If you want a player for everything, use Xine. In the future when GStreamer has the required features, we’ll all be able to switch over to that instead.
“I would like Totem to recognize the file format and show an alert to the user “would you like to download from the web these formats and install them?” — Totem already does this when it can, and has done so for a long time.
Epiphany
The usual minor issues which get blown out of all proportion as show-stopping bugs for the entire desktop. File a bug, create a patch, do something!
Text and Video Messaging Integration
I think the gnomemeeting maintainer covered this one…
Burning Application
GNOME the desktop is going towards tools to help end-users. Thus we have nautilus-cd-burner which is wonderful for the very common task of “burn these files”. I have a patch (honest, I do) for Rhythmbox which lets that burn audio CDs from playlists. I don’t see the need for a fully-featured 100% coverage CD burning tool in the GNOME desktop.
Most important for me is the topic with the legal/not legal codecs for eg Totem and the topic about copy and paste.
My full agreement to this !!!!!
For Videoediting the program transcode (swiss army knife for videocoding) will be a beautiful codebase
– I was referring to the seperate HTML engines inside Nautilus (GTK-KHTML) and Epiphany (Gecko). I don’t really care if an app like Evolution uses it if the main engine isn’t capable of a feature it needs, but there is no reason for the GTK-KHTML and Gecko split.
– aRts is a powerful multimedia framework. A lot of its capabilities are not documented as such, but they are there. It brings multimedia capabilities to every KDE app. I’m not going to argue that its as good as GStreamer. However, GStreamer really isn’t a competitor to aRts yet — its not yet fully stable, and almost no GNOME apps use it. As for GStreamer in KDE, we’ll see. GStreamer is up for consideration, but along with other options like MAS. MAS would probably be a better choice, because it is desktop neutral and fills the whole range of required capability (sound server, network transparency, multimedia framework) instead of just part of it like GStreamer.
— You do realize that, in this regard, KParts isn’t any different from COM? COM is just a glorified C++ class loader too. They achieve cross-language compatibility by having other languages understand the Visual C++ v-table layout. KPart’s language bindings (they’ve got ones for Java and Python, among others) operate on the same principle. On top of that, KParts provides the UI-merging and document handling features of OLE. So if COM/OLE is a component framework, so is KParts. Its not as overengineered as Bonobo/CORBA, but that’s a good thing. CORBA is a first-class pain in the ass. Its one of those crappy designed-by-committee APIs I was referring to. The C++ mapping is really and truely horrid, and its alien to both classic C++ and modern C++ design styles. I know this from first-hand experience — my current project at work is CORBA from the ground-up. A lot of the FUD about CORBA isn’t true. Some ORBs, particularly OmniORB and ORBit, are really quite fast. But it is a hassle to use. In the end, the proof is in the pudding. KParts are used everywhere in KDE. They’re so easy and well integrated, there is a very low opportunity cost in using them. In comparison, there are just a handful of Bonobo-enabled applications. And does GNOME have anything like DCOP scripting?
— Actually, the developers have stated that much of the architecture would *not* be reinvented, at least not in the time-frame of KDE4. Its Havoc Pennington that wants the new VFS layer, not Waldo Bastien. Again, I would not have a problem with it, as long as the result is closer to KIO (every app uses it transparently), than to GNOME-VFS (some apps do, some apps don’t).
The nice things about the KDE architecture aren’t just embodied in each seperate component or API. Its about the unity. Unity is everywhere in the KDE framework, and it is strangely absent in the GNOME one.
I might be getting a little defensive about KDE, but I’ve got good reason to be. There is a principle known as “worse is better.” It states that worse technology gets more widely used than better technology, because worse technology often has some advantages, like backwards compatibility, or ease of implementation, or corporate backing. Any alternative computer language user is painfully aware of this fact. GNOME has the potential of being that worse technology that still gets more widespread use. Its got backwards compatibility on its side — there are many more C developers, especially in FOSS, than C++ ones. Its got ease of implementation on its side — GNOME is structured as a loosely coupled collection of libraries, that plays nice with external technologies (Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc), while KDE is an integrated whole. Now, GNOME has major corporate support too.
Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get me!
What is gnome-keyring?
I have the impression you misunderstood what i was talking about…
Victor.
I didn’t mean to come off so harsh on GNOME. It really is a nice desktop environment, and I’ll be the first to admit that their insistence on following the HIG have produced some extremely polished applications. I’m just saying that the underlying guts are nothing special compared to the competition. Users coming from other environments might not notice the difference, but its painfully obvious to a KDE user.
I’d love to see fast image thumbnailing for nautilus.
I’ve yet to see any app running on xfree that can generate thunbnails on the fly quickly like windows does.
There’s obviously something wrong with the way developers are approaching this issue on xfree. The same task on windows seems to be about 15-20x faster.
What exactly is windows doing that’s so different?
Some of you here with lots of photos(3000+) will know exactly what i’m talking about here
Gnomemeeting needs to be able to communicate with the p2p phone program SKYPE so we Linux users can get into contact with the “millions” that are claimed to have downloaded SKYPE and are running it on their Windows boxes… I can’t believe it’s just me who would like to p2p with the fam. for christmas ;o)
And on our wish list this year is a NICE FAT CHECK!
There you have it Santa! If you did that you’d help us put quite a few people into full time jobs developing free (as in beer), software for the disabled of the world, and support our move to open source in the new year as well :o) – Does it get much better?
If anyone else wants to chip in, visit
globability.org/signature/sig.htm
ANY HELP will be appreciated!
Best Regards – And a Merry Christmas to everyone from The Development Team!
>Nautilus 2.6 will support funky new plugins, with a clean >API and decent menu merging. I though Eugenia was keeping >up with Nautilus development, she certainly posts on >nautilus-list now and again.
–>Nice !
>Metacity Features
–>Again : A Nice Control Panel for metacity, where u can also add a “I want my keep on top feature” . There is a bug sumbitted for that in bugzilla, but only the possibility to assign a keystroke for that has been implemented. Seriously, that’s NOT a geeky feature
Development Tools
>”Glade is junk, end of story” — Eugenia. Right. Personally I consider Glade to be a wonderful interface designer, and makes coding GTK+ interfaces trivial. I hope this isn’t referring to the “Generate Source” button in Glade, which is generally considered to be A Bad Idea when using C.
>Personally, I hope that Eclipse’s C support will mature and someone integrates Glade somehow, even if it is just a button to launch the binary. But I’m happy with Glade +
libglade + xemacs.
–>I either don’t like Glade, I think QtDesigner is better, but ok.
doing a gtk-interface-builder plugin for eclipse would be very nice, but I think, it’s very hard. But note that then eclipse3.0 come’s out, CDT will also come out – so we will have a real nice C/C++ developper platform. Perhaps then, time has come to implement a gtk-plugin for eclipse. The fact is, we should not underestimate eclipse : I think, it will soon be somethink like “The Standart IDE”
>GConf Editor
>A search button for gconf-editor could be handy, but generally tried looking in /apps/[app-name]?
–>I think that should be a nice feature
>Samba on Nautilus
>GNOME 2.4 I believe had a new smb: implementation, and in >GNOME 2.6 it will rock even more.
–>No, sorry, but Samba implementation in gnome 2.4 is really really bad. Nautilus allways takes so much time to navigate throw my samba network (konqueror, and linNeighborhood are so much faster!). Worser : it so often happens that nautilus hangs up.
>Rhythmbox and Totem
>”Use the XMMS visualization plugins” — not possible. It is impossible to link GTK+ 1.2 and GTK+ 2.x code in the same binary.
–>They are plugins from xmms ported to beep-media-player, which is a gtk2 app. look at :
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3521242&foru…
But is it enought top port them to rhythmbox/Totem ? Do they have the same plugin interface ? (Does Rhythmbox has a plugin interface ???)
>”Totem … use either Gstreamer or Xine on the fly” — why? I’d say that everything GStreamer can play, Xine can play. If you want a player for everything, use Xine. In the future when GStreamer has the required features, we’ll all be able to switch over to that instead.
–> I also though that this is a good idea. It would be nice to switch to what ever multimedia framework I want – gstreamer, nmm, Xine… But I think, it’s not really possible. But gstreamer and Xine would be nice. I think that u only can play file with xine, but with gstreamer-cvs , u can now edit tags .
>Burning Application
>GNOME the desktop is going towards tools to help end-users. Thus we have nautilus-cd-burner which is wonderful for the very common task of “burn these files”. I have a patch (honest, I do) for Rhythmbox which lets that burn audio CDs from playlists. I don’t see the need for a fully-featured 100% coverage CD burning tool in the GNOME desktop.
–>Windows also has a CDBurning tool, that is quite good. I think, it’s an important application
An unconventional thought just came to me, which could save the Linux world… Having followed user arguments about Gnome vs. KDE for quite a while now, it seems conclusive: KDE has more advanced underlying technologies, while Gnome has a better-developed UI. Thus, my idea is compromise on both sides: Gnome (lets say, in version 3.0) switches from GTK+ to Qt as its developing environment, thus solving the problem of developer tools, network transparency, extensible programming language support, and speed. KDE, then, should adopt Gnome’s HIG. Sure, it can keep its desktop as unique as possible, but where applications are concerned there should be a standard.
This would lead to a consolidation of Linux applications, an easier time for developers and a better experience for end users.
I should also mention that in an interview, Novell’s 2nd-in-command (I forget his name) targeted unified development tools for Gnome and KDE as a main goal for the near future.
Excuse but that’s really dumb, specially cause the better applications are made of GTK, evolution, gimp, etc.., I still haven found that killer appication on KDE (qt) that will made an enterprise use it, Suse is a KDE based distro yet includes killer GTK applications like evolution and GIMP, maybe KDE should move to GTK.
While I’ll agree that most of the better applications are made with GTK+, there are several killer apps for Qt:
Qt Designer
KDevelop
Quanta
K3b
And of course, Qt/KDE has pretty close equivalents for other things, like Kontact, Konqueror, etc.
However, Qt is still the better toolkit. Its got native versions on Mac, Windows, and UNIX. Its got better development tools (Designer vs Glade). Its faster. Its got an integrated API for stuff like XML parsing, DB handling, etc. Its got better documentation. Its got built-in scripting support (QSA).
From a programming perspective what is dumb is to use a c lib to do something that is a classic example of what oop shoud be used for and anyone who thinks otherwise should be shot in head (just kidding). That said i must note that from an end-user perspective it only matters if it works or not.
And PLEASE ! include a “kepp on top” feature in metacity.
If u think, that’s tooo geaky (and I really DON’T think so), than include an window for that in the control panel.
May I make a suggestion? If your window manager is configured to not pop the window to front when you click in it then the need for ‘keep on top’ and ‘keep on bottom’ options disappear. Most window managers can be configured to bring the window to front or send to back (if already at front) when clicking the title bar. This way the windows keep their position unless you intentionally move them, and this feels so much more intuitive than specific ‘keep’ options for the windows. Saying that, I’m not sure how well metacity handles this (last I tried it didn’t handle it well with sloppy focus, but things may have changed since then.) Anyway, I’m sure it isn’t for everyone but if you try it you might find you like it. Personally I think it should be the default behavior instead of copying Windows.
Hi
I want that gnome runs with the gdk-backend directfb
Yeah A Bit Like Be. Especially the navigation part of it.
Just Right click and select the app/Folder!!
If I have to click on ten folders to find a file, then that is a pain in the neck
Not everyone uses Gnome (despite its corporate backing by RH, Sun, etc). But a KDE wishlist would be nice as well… perhaps for 3.3? My first one would be new icons for KDE’s APM. KDE has some nice eye-candy and some great themes. Even Lindows made some improvements in their latest release (Laptop Edition), but the APM icons look like a 7 year old with MS Paint making 8 bit bitmaps. It needs some polishing.
Also, and this is sorely lacking in all Linux GUIs (I know, I know… window manager). All Linux GUIs need a working, quality, graphical VPN client.
Actually, significantly more Linux users use KDE than GNOME. Although, that number might have changed with the Sun/China deal.
While I’ll agree that most of the better applications are made with GTK+, there are several killer apps for Qt:
Qt Designer
KDevelop
Quanta
K3b
And of course, Qt/KDE has pretty close equivalents for other things, like Kontact, Konqueror, etc.
However, Qt is still the better toolkit. Its got native versions on Mac, Windows, and UNIX. Its got better development tools (Designer vs Glade). Its faster. Its got an integrated API for stuff like XML parsing, DB handling, etc. Its got better documentation. Its got built-in scripting support (QSA).
Qt Designer and KDevelop are not common user applications, those are developers applications I would count it like a killer app, about Quanta I dont yhink on quanta like a killer application specially having blue fish in GNOME, Kontac is an Evolucion wannabe and wont come with the exchange plugin that wont help and yet Evolution is and will be better than Kontact.
Konqueror is to bloated and I have the same efect witk Epiphany, no a killer application eather and btw, I dont spend 90% of my time in the open file dialog so Nautilus work fine.
And Glade, well, Glade can create the graphic interface dor C, C++, PERL, Python, etc. something qt designer can’t.
K3B I’ve never used I do all my burning typing burn:/// in nautilus and droping the files there, simple.
Oh, and about qt being better enviromet to export ro mac o Windows, met me tell you GTK applications are already there wit mac-gimp, abiword, sodipodi etc.
KDE still have a long way to go in applications development.
There is really no way how you could say that with confidence. Website polls don’t count and vary greatly in results anyway.
Will be great that Mozilla, Galeon, Epiphany and may be Konkeror have the same BookMark database, may be with the use of a subsystem to share o common bookmark management.
There is really no way how you could say that with confidence. Website polls don’t count and vary greatly in results anyway.
Actually is a well known fact that there are around 200 Linux distros and from those, only a small number sets GNOME as default DE. Remember that some of the most successful commercial distros like Mandrake, Lindows, Xandros and the likes have chosen KDE as default DE.
However, being RedHat the major player in the Linux world, should be perfectly understandable the industry support that GNOME have been gaining. But even with the recent deal between Sun and the chinese government, I don´t think that this “status quo” has changed, although it can change in the foreseeable future.
— DeadFish Man
I see, I thought you were referring to the two versions of gtkhtml in use.
Yes, it would be nice if Evolution used Gecko, however given how few people use Konqueror (at least according to all the statistics I’ve seen) as their web browser, you could equally argue that KDE has two web rendering engines.
COM and KParts are entirely different. The COM vTable format might be the same as what the VC++ compiler spits out, however COM is definately language neutral. From the variants API, to IDispatch based late binding, COM is designed for language neutrality. The COM ABI is very simple. The C++ ABI is the most complex ever seen and is basically impossible to use unless you are a C++ compiler. Now, you could say that the cost of making it KDE and C++ specific justifies the benefit of having it widely used within KDE, I don’t know. Personally I don’t dig KDE or GNOME specific technologies, they are not usable by somebody like me who wishes to remain desktop neutral.
Finally, I’d ask why MAS is more “desktop neutral” than GStreamer. Is it because GStreamer has a G in the name? Can you give concrete examples of why MAS would be a better choice than GStreamer that don’t involve politics?
KHTML + a slim GTK2 interface (similar to epiphany) would be quite nice IMO.
Trev
Actually is a well known fact that there are around 200 Linux distros and from those, only a small number sets GNOME as default DE. Remember that some of the most successful commercial distros like Mandrake, Lindows, Xandros and the likes have chosen KDE as default DE.
However, being RedHat the major player in the Linux world, should be perfectly understandable the industry support that GNOME have been gaining. But even with the recent deal between Sun and the chinese government, I don´t think that this “status quo” has changed, although it can change in the foreseeable future.
— DeadFish Man
Well, you thing wrong, certainly most distros come with KDE but the GNOME is on the big leagues with RH, Sun Java and Novell using XIMIAN, the true is GNOME number of user is growing everyday and is gettin more support from the big companies.
The COM ABI *is* the C++ ABI. The COM ABI is defined as the structure of the v-tables spit out by the Visual C++ compiler. The C++ ABI is complex at points, but both KParts and COM only use the v-table portion of the ABI. I don’t see how it is “completely different” from KParts. And its not impossible to use, because a number of different language bindings are available for KParts. PyQt and PyKDE, KJSEmbed, and the KDE Java binding offer pretty much full access to the API. More generally, libraries like Boost.Python provide nearly transparent for two-way integration with C++ code.
There is a cost/benefit trade-off associated with KDE or GNOME specific technologies, but ultimately, they are better for the user. If you can live with Mozilla not integrating with OpenOffice, or bundling disparate apps like Gnumeric and AbiWord and calling it “GNOME Office”, and the main messaging client (GAIM) not even being a GNOME application, that’s fine. That’s why GNOME and KDE exit, anyway, to provide choice. But some people feel that integration is important, and KDE offers users that choice.
As for MAS, its very simple. GStreamer depends heavily on glib. aRts (optionally) uses some glib utility routines, but GStreamer is fundamentally tied to glib and its object model. And say what you want about politics, the fact of the matter is that politics can get a project killed. Hell, it was politics that started GNOME, so don’t talk about politics like you can separate them from technical reality.
…how does it produce such high quality applications like The GIMP, Totem, Gaim and Evolution to mention a few? Some might go as far as stating that the looks, polish and finesse of many of these GTK+ applications supersede anything found in the qt sphere. Yet, my opponents still argue that GTK+ sucks. Oh, and glade does too.
I am sometimes tempted to request that these individuals who say Glade and GTK+ suck show me an application or example code they have written, and demonstrate to me how either of these quality tools have contributed to making their applications or code suck. Perhaps, I’m asking too much.
Then when the naysayers say that the language, C, was just not meant to be an object oriented framework, I point to them the GNOME platform and numerous GNOME applications successfully written with the language, C, GTK+ and sometimes Glade.
If the naysayers were right, GNOME , several GNOME applications and GTK+ applications would be failures. But, alas, GNOME, several GNOME applications as well as numerous GTK+ applications are being adopted on a large scaled by eminent entities around the globe. Yet, GTK+ and Glade sucks.
I have used both Qt and GTK+. Qt is arguably better and easier to use. But it is clearly over hyped. At least when compared to GTK+. In the end, it all boils down to where you like using C or C++ to design your graphical user interface. The fad is that object oriented languages are more powerful in producing graphical user interfaces.(I don’t believe that either.)
So among the new age developers or win32 developers, C++/Qt is more attractive, hence GTK+/Glade just sucks.
I see a bunch of people simply writing ‘there are better apps written in GTK’. Now I would like to know on what technical aspects their opinion is based on ? Ok The GIMP is a very good example sure but Evolution ?
Let’s view the things from a different point. Say Evolution for example, the Menu and Toolbar ain’t following the GNOME HIG at all while it is a GNOME related program. Interoperability is not existing e.g. Nautilus has it’s own Bookmarks system, Galeon has it’s own system, Epiphany has it’s own system, GThumb … and so on. There is no central repository for bookmarks. Addressbooks are not exchangable with other applications on the GNOME framework. I can’t take an Evolution address and use it in other applications. I know GAIM has the possibility to do this since a few days (due the bounty) but the implementation is only limited to GAIM here and thus not adaptable to other programs. While the programs do show some aesthetical pro’s their underlaying layer is not extendable or re-usable. They are simply standalone programs.
See KDE for example. There is one core repository for Bookmarks which were shared between Konqueror and other applications. They link FTP, Normal URI’s, Pictures and whatever and keep it all in one common tree. A lot of simple re-use of components make it possible due to Objects that I can re-use.
The sentence that there are absolutely no good applications for KDE is plain wrong which I can not share. If we look close then we see more good applications showing up for KDE than for GNOME. Applications that seamless embedd into the Desktop due to great framework (It’s impossible to code wrong here because of the framework). Applications for 2d/3d modelling which is not available for GNOME, great Astronomy/Astrology programs for students and scientists. A really usable UML program for the same userbase. It’s easy to write new applications in a short amount of time depending on the needs. I for my own think that KParts is far better from the system than what GNOME has to offer. While every new app installed on KDE offers a good plugin (which can be used by other applications e.g. extends Konqueror with new features) the GNOME people play with shitty Views which you mostly not know whether they exist or not until someone tells you.
People simply say Abiword is better than KWord and Gnumeric is better than KSpread. Maybe this is true, maybe not. It all depends on proper testing and verification imo. Say even if Abiword or Gnumeric are better then you need to think further here. Abiword is written by a company and the technical things usually done in it that makes it GNOME conform are only GNOME and Unix specific the other parts are written by other people. A team of 5-6 people in it’s best. KWord, KSpread and things like that should be seen as KOffice (as one suite) where only 2-3 people work on. But they on the otherhand work on 6-7 apps at a time.
I think that people should really spent into reading some tutorials and documentations around the KDE and GNOME framework and should so some minor coding to understand all this.
Look GStreamer for example, it exist for 4 years now but it’s still not stable enough and not well implemented enough in GNOME everything around GNOME is half, the framework is half, partially broken.
1.- I think that people should really spent into reading some tutorials and documentations around the KDE and GNOME framework and should so some minor coding to understand all this.
2.- Look GStreamer for example, it exist for 4 years now but it’s still not stable enough and not well implemented enough in GNOME everything around GNOME is half, the framework is half, partially broken.
1.- I’ve read the tutorials, yet qt applicatiosn are not to functional.
2- Sorry, but you are wrong, I don’t have any problems with gstreamer and your words about evolution, qhy don’t you ask the people who is using it and are productive with it in a office?
You have no base in your words.
3.-Applications for 2d/3d modelling which is not available for GNOME, great Astronomy/Astrology programs for students and scientists.
3.- So does GTK, http://www.gnome.org and clik on the software map link, surprised?
You write big words here buddy. Can you explain ‘technically’ why you think GNOME is better than KDE ?
Well your corporate interests is an interesting aspect. RH, Ximian, Novell but these companies are not doing the majority of work around GNOME (at least it was so). When I think 4 years back then GNOME was a funny community with people who spent all their free time into GNOME until Ximian and SUN made some mess out of it by going into the commercial directions. Companies like Ximian and SUN show up on all place and make lousy decisions where it will go in the next couple of years obviously leaving big questionmarks of the volunteers working on it. Announcements like ‘MONO soon in GNOME’ or ‘we will make GNOME a corporate Desktop’ doesn’t sound motivating to people either. Even after Novell has bought Ximian it doesn’t mean that Novell automatically became the legitimate owner of GNOME. It’s not like they come up throw all the people out and take over leadership and maintainance. They have their own interests and it should stay theirs.
Making GNOME commerical is more the interests of 2-3 companies but not the interests of the people. Many people I know about just want a cool Desktop that operates well enough, where they can hack the one or other application where they can feel like they were part of it. When I want to work on a GNOME project then I want to feel like I’m part of that project, like I’m someone who contribute to it like equal partners. When I listen to announcements made by Miguel de Icaza or Nat Friedman then I get the feeling like being the dumb developer working for their moneybags. Is the community really growing ? I can’t say – I usually do not count the people working on it and the people who join/leave it.
Some weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with Kandalf (Ralf Nolden) who joined us in the #gnome-de IRC channel and he told me that KDE tries to offer total freedom to the user and developer and thus they are trying to keep companies outside of the project. They do accept money as well as moral support from them e.g. SuSE or The Kompany but they are usually threatened as equal partners and don’t give people the feeling like being ripped off. At least they do not need to show up on all places and make promises they can not keep.
Let’s look at Novell who bought Ximian. Can anyone (maybe you) explain what Novell actually bought ? Did they buy GNOME ? NO !, did they buy MONO ? NO !. They only bought the brand Ximian, the employees but no properties. I also belive that people shouldn’t expect to much from SUN, Ximian/Novell here since they are just contributing. They contribute and do not own and I want it to be like this for the next upcoming 20 years. I want to have the feeling to work for a free project a project driven by the community, a project which should be professional – not a project where developers and users get the feeling that ‘now it starts to get interesting’ to be ripped off.
Im not talking about the desktop Im talking about GTK appications, can’t you read?.
And why do you think those companies are spending money on GNOME and XIMIAN, that’s right, cause they have a better licence and a better desktop.
Yeah, som guy trying Linux is making pretty his KDE desktop meanwhile big companies are developing GNOME to make it better even better.
FYI I am in the GNOME community. I know the apps. I know what exists. I know the framework. I know the people.
Your reply for me not having a base of argumentation is nothing more than ignorance. To help GNOME become a better plattform we need to discuss about it’s problems and not ignore it.
FYI I’m receiving more mails written with MUTT or PINE from all sorts of gnome related mailinglists than mails written with Evolution. But ok. Please tell me how many companies seriously use Evolution. I would be thankful to get some numbers here.
Spreading the ‘word’ that a lot of companies use it until the last one belives it is creating opinions. Showing some numbers that verifies it is more realistic. Say from 10 mio Linux users there are 5 mio using Evolution which means 50% of the Linux community uses Evo and the other 50% uses Mutt, Balsa, Pine, Sylpheed, MozillaMail etc.
I now tell you that I do belive that more companies simply use Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Mail for doing their Mails rather than using Evolution. I can’t confirm it but so can’t you with Evo.
BTW, your words have no base at all, you just bash GNOME w/o proves, let me guess, do you have GIMP in your KDE desktop?, Evolution maybe? some other GTK professional applications? that can be used in a enterprice?
Actually, Im just showing the features KDE user don’t know about GNOME and keep bashin it.
Read my post, IM just answering their questions.
Yes, I remark how GNOME is getting lots of supprot, so does the KDE communiy remarking KDE succes, there’s nothing worng with it.
Your reply for me not having a base of argumentation is nothing more than ignorance. To help GNOME become a better plattform we need to discuss about it’s problems and not ignore it.
Actually that’s true, so should do the KDE community instead looking GNOME bugs.
now tell you that I do belive that more companies simply use Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Mail for doing their Mails rather than using Evolution. I can’t confirm it but so can’t you with Evo.
And I bet they use less KMAIL, IM talking about companies using Linux not Windows.
I’m not saying that GTK+ sucks and you can’t make good apps with it. Its a very nice toolkit, and its way nicer than some of the other stuff that’s available. But Qt just has the edge in a lot of ways. Qt doesn’t totally crush GTK+, rather, its slightly ahead in a race of two well-matched competitors.
In general, there are more GTK+/GNOME developers than KDE developers. The powerful KDE framework gives KDE developers an edge, in that its easy to throw something functional together in a short time, but that’s also the reason why a lot of KDE apps look and feel unpolished. I’d wager a lot more man-hours have gone into Gnumeric vs, say, KSpread.
I think we should increase the quality of exchanging replies to each other here without giving the readers the idea of being immature kids.
Let’s not stick on one application here. See the entire whole of a Desktop as is. A good plugins system, good interoperability across applications, cleaness, documentation, api documentation, easy to write new apps, not stuffed full of language bindings in it’s core (e.g. make it an requirement). Apps that simply work. Apps that people know how they look and feel from other plattforms (offering similar look and feel). Apps that can be extended easily due to good framework. Apps that stay as is for quite some longer time and being made stable and solid and not changed over and over again because the developer feel bored over the weekend.
There are a bunch of wrong approaches in GNOME e.g. glueing OOo and Mozilla (GRE) into the core and there are a bunch of applications which are left unmaintained for long. E.g. no Presentation app (Criawips as well as Agnubis) are basically unmaintained. Dia is far from even following GNOME or GTK+ (agreements, styles, HIG or whatever) not to mention that it’s useless for professional work. Look during my time as student I urgently needed an open source UML creating programm or some program to do DIN 60001 (?) well standard IT diagramms and DIA was quite unusable for this task. Saved files couldn’t be loaded anymore, Font rendering always broken, LibXSL path was hardcoded and serious help (which I gave them) was ignored. Now what about the apps that simply work ? I need programs that can be seriously trusted. Who somehow work reliable. Reliability is the keyword here. You should be able to trust the program blindly. When I open Nautilus and copy a directory from FTP to my system then I must trust this program blindly. When I browse my files and by mistake click up or another view then the program should not crash.. Things like this. I do not care whether it’s KDE or GNOME. This is a general thing that I wish from KDE and GNOME.
I want when I do a bookmark with GThumb that this bookmark is being shown in Nautilus as well so I can use Nauti to browse into that directory. When I browse with Nauti and create a bookmark to a .html file that I often need to read then I want this bookmark to be re-usable in Epiphany or Galeon so when I start them that I can load the page from within there.
When I write some addresses into Evolution then I would really love to use them in Abiword when writting a letter to a friend (like Include address here.. but I must admit that I rarely use Abiword so I don’t know whether it works or not).
Hope you understand what I am saying here.
Let’s forget the childish behavior with KDE and GNOME for example but I do see a bunch of KDE applications offering these keyfeatures. But asking the question “why does it offer these features or how can it offer it” then the answer is “due to it’s framework”.
Let’s not stick on one application here. See the entire whole of a Desktop as is. A good plugins system, good interoperability across applications, cleaness, documentation
I spend much time writing about gtk applications as you just talk about the KDE desktop, remember, the desktop aint nothing w/o the appications.
Killer applications: Is there something like ‘a killer app’ ? It also depends on the needs and requirements of the user.
But well I do prefer Konqueror over Nautilus here because it simply works and I do love the KParts system over the GNOME views.
I do like Umbrello more than DIA. At least it saved me a lot of time when I urgently needed it.
I do like The GIMP because it’s a cool application.
But maybe you realize that I speak more about the framework rather than applications itself. What I try to say is that a good framework offers you easy application writing, better integration a more unified look.
Example: GNOME is cleaning up a lot of it’s previous made mistakes e.g. DEPRECATING a lot of old junk from libgnomeui, libbonoboui, GTK and so on (to name all them will take a lot of time). Now think about the people who develop programs, it’s overkill to change all the functions to suit the new needs. We are basically stuck in permanently adjusting applications to a new API rather than making programs rockstable and go on writing new apps once something became rockstable. More deep explaination: GtkCombo differs totally from GtkComboBox while the API is frozen for the 2.x series it still means that you need to change to the new API sooner or later. You are forced to this somehow not just because of new API because everyone is doing so. And I can tell you that the GtkCombo totally differs from API to GtkComboBox. While you were able to add a GList to GtkCombo you now need to create a Treemodell for GtkComboBox which means that under bad circumstances you need a lot of time only to adjust these things. Ok DEPRECATING old things is good and I am thankful that this is happening (somehow) it finally shows that GNOME is getting rid of previously made mistakes. But we need to protect new developers from using DEPRECATED things by telling them before what they should not use. Such a documentation/tutorial is totally missing. People who still use GNOME 2.4 and started writing new applications could by mistake use things which are marked as DEPRECATED in 2.5 we need to protect them from going the painful way of makeing huge changes.
Well this is only the pit of the Mountain from various examples. If you repeat that GNOME is so cool by denying the problems it has then how do you think such problems can be fixed ? I think speaking about GNOME adding wishes to it makes a lot of sense and Eugenia did it right here. But this shouldn’t exclude the fact that we need to speak about the problems as well. The pro’s and con’s.
Againg you are talking as a developer, final users don’t mess with APIS just developers, Im a user and not a developer I don’t care about APIS, I just care to have good applications to do my work and I found that on GTK applicatios, so does the GTK developers that’s why they KEEP working on GTK APIS.
Actually I could drop GNOME for XFACE and I would be happy using my GTK applications there. Dont talk about framerwork.
What about this do you not understand? How good the toolkits are has little to do with which gets the “killer applications.” The OSS community has a lot more C developers than C++ developers, and there were a lot of concerns over licensing before Qt became GPL, so GTK+ got a lot of initial momentum. That doesn’t have anything to do with how good the toolkits are, but concerns outside the realm of the technical. I’ve mentioned the features in which Qt is better than GTK+. GTK+ has the edge over Qt in some respects (accessibility via ATK and internationalization via Pango), but on the balance, Qt is a better toolkit. Not vastly so, but noticably so.
* To be fair, there are a lot of excellent Qt/KDE applications (Kate, Konq, Kopete, KDevelop, Quanta, KOffice, Kontact, etc). They may not all be best-of-class, but they’re very good.
Ok I do accept your statement of just being a user and no need to deal with API’s. But now please tell me on what facts you base your opinion that GTK+ apps are generally better ?
Example: to know whether an Apple Macintosh is better than an AMD/Intel based system you need to know the technical aspects about it.
to know whether a yellow Bananna tastes better than a green one you need to know the technical aspect of things being ripe.
to know whether you get drunk from drinking coke or drinking vodka you need to know the technical aspect of alcoholics.
Same with Desktops and applications. To know whether a Desktop is good or not you need to be at least skilled enough to understand some basics about it. Everything else is just an opinion and basing opinions on fancy icons or because everyone else told you is plain wrong.
Example: to know whether an Apple Macintosh is better than an AMD/Intel based system you need to know the technical aspects about it.
to know whether a yellow Bananna tastes better than a green one you need to know the technical aspect of things being ripe.
to know whether you get drunk from drinking coke or drinking vodka you need to know the technical aspect of alcoholics.
Sorry but… is that a joke? Since the prehistoric ages, your average caveman knew rotten meat was worse than fresh meat. Those statements make no sense.
The same way I know a car runs faster than another without reading its technical specs (just driving), I can know if an app is better than another just using it. Or do you think I need to know the implementation details of GIMP and Paint to know why one is better than the other?
At least you know it’s a painting program that you like to use. The GIMP is good as well as bad together.
One person use The GIMP because he knows what he is doing due to having spent some time into that program, reading some documentations and stuff like that and then says that it’s a great program.
Other people can say it’s a bad program because it’s full of things they don’t know about and thus do not figure out howto paint a simple picture.
It all depends on the needs of one. Some people may find Paint better than The GIMP depending on their needs and their knowledge what they like to do with that program. But what does it technically tell us about both programs ? Nothing !
It all depends on the needs of one. Some people may find Paint better than The GIMP depending on their needs and their knowledge what they like to do with that program. But what does it technically tell us about both programs ? Nothing !
That’s the point. An end user won’t care about underlying structure and technicalities. Even if a program is a messy visual basic project, as long as it works and fits his needs, it’s good for him and better than the rest. And that’s what matters in desktops for your average user.
Of course, that’s not an excuse to improve the underlying code to be better not losing features, but you get the point
The integrated framework and the power of the APIs isn’t just a developer advantage, its a user-visible advantage. Let me give you some personal examples:
1) All KDE apps automagically use KIO. Recently, I needed to do a website for a project. I just opened up Kate (a regular programmer’s editor) and edited the files directly on the remote server. No need to “upload” or “synchronize” or anything like that. I needed to make some screenshots to put on the page. Again, no problem: I saved them directly to the server from ksnapshot. When I need to print a file from my dorm desktop to our central campus printers, there is no need for me to upload it to my network account, I can save it directly from KWord. GNOME has GNOME-VFS, but not many apps use it.
2) All KDE apps use a unified configuration mechanism. If I need to make a configuration change directly, I know that all the rc files are in a known place. GNOME has this know, but a lot of GNOME apps still don’t use gconf for everything.
3) The QT/KDE theming mechanism separates color schemes from widget styles. No editing gtkrc manually to set something simple like theme colors!
4) All KDE apps use a centralized toolbar mechanism This makes all KDE toolbars fully configurable, using the same configuration dialogs. All KDE apps also use a centralized acceleration handling mechanism, and there is a similarly standard configuration dialog for those.
5) KDE apps are heavily componentized. That means that Konqueror can embed pretty much embed any media type. Nautilus has this capability through Bonobo, but there are far fewer componentized apps on GNOME, so there are fewer things available for Nautilus to embed.
6) Most KDE apps are DCOP scriptable. KJS offers very powerful scripting that can access the whole KDE API. This is for more advanced users, but there are a lot of those on Linux. Even less advanced users can use scripts made by others.
7) There are lots of centralized services that leverage the framework, like kwallet, and khotkeys. Some GNOME apps have mouse gestures, but with khotkeys, *all* KDE apps get mouse gestures. And thanks to DCOP, there are some *extremely* powerful things you can do in response to a hotkey or gesture invocation.
Lastly, don’t forget that the framework speeds up application development and makes for cooler applications. If KHTML wasn’t so easy to embed, so many KDE apps wouldn’t use it to display HTML. KDE doesn’t have as much developer manpower as the the GNOME community, and so this advantage makes for applications that are a lot better than they would be.
Why people forget Scribus?
Sorry
You’re right, though, Scribus is nifty.
Scroll down for my reply to Ross’ blog regarding my article:
http://www.burtonini.com/cgi/pyblosxom.cgi/computers/gnome-wishlist…
You say that GTK+ is better than Qt simply because of “killer apps”?
1) Killer apps usually mean applications that cause people en masse to get out, buy a new computer just to use it. One of the first killer apps for the PC is spreadsheets. With Lotus 1-2-3 on the market, thousands of businesses went out to buy a new computer for their clerk/secretary/accountant to do spreadsheets. The most recent one is Internet – hundreds of thousands went out and bought new PCs just to surf the Net.
So far, I have yet to see a single killer app for Linux in general, no less GTK+.
2) As for better apps, it is very subjective. I much prefer KMail to Evolution, simply because KMail only does mail, yet it integrates so seemlessly with other apps, like the addressbook, etc. As for GIMP, it was GIMP that started GTK (thus the name GIMP Tool Kit), it is kinda obvious they would use it until today. As for GAIM – how is it better than Kopete? Using them both, I would prefer to use Kopete (i.e. I can take addresses from a central location, but in GAIM I can’t take addresses from Evolution).
Windows has far more applications than any other platform, does it mean that Win32 is better that say, Cocoa, or Qt, or GTK+ or BeAPI, or heck, even .NET? Nope, it is crappy, hard to learn, buggy, full of holes, and at times unstable. Nobody with a sane mind would even suggest that Win32 is better than anything else competing with it. The same case could be applied between GTK+ and Qt.
Besides, you only mentioned open source applications. What about Opera? It is certainly better than Epiphany, Galeon. Photoshop Album (unavailable on Linux)? mokey Imagineer? Raindrop Geomagic? Is there any GTK+ equilevent to those? What about Mainconcept? While hardly being the best video editing application, it certainly blows any GTK+ app doing the same. Since you said you are just comparing applications using the toolkit, how many GTK+ applications do you know that can run out of the box on a Zaurus, or one of those Motorola smartphones?
7) There are lots of centralized services that leverage the framework, like kwallet, and khotkeys. Some GNOME apps have mouse gestures, but with khotkeys, *all* KDE apps get mouse gestures. And thanks to DCOP, there are some *extremely* powerful things you can do in response to a hotkey or gesture invocation.
Some Gnome applications have mouse gestures? Didn’t know about that… do you have an example; how do i enable it?
Thanks
Victor
I feel the author did not do their homework on this article. If they would have asked the Coaster team what was going on, they would find out that we have moved libburn to freedesktop.org and now just need to stabilize it, then the gui can really take off. So…project dead?…Not even close. I do know the site is horribly out of date, and I have been working on the updated version for some time. Being in school, sometimes time becomes nil. Rest assured that linuxland will see a proper update on the project sometime this week as well as an updated website.
So how do you solve some of these and other problems mentioned in the article. There are two ways. File bugs and/or send patches/updates. There is no other way these will get solved in a timely manner. Same goes to any UI complaints. File a bug or send a patch with the new design that is better. This is the way OSS works.
> Copy/Paste still misbehaves after all these years
> Copy/paste still just doesn’t work properly. I cut or copy
> files off my desktop and try to paste them on another
> Nautilus window and that would only work half the time.
Oh so true. The solution (as I learnt on bugzilla) is to press the update button, then you will be given the option to paste. The same goes for associating an application with a file type. Press update, first, then the newly associated app will be available. Stupid, isn’t it?
I must honestly confess that the reason I keep using gnome is that it looks cooler than KDE and it has more native apps (gimp et al).
Although I agree with some of your points about kde/qt’s architecture, I want to bring up my reasons for strongly preferring gtk as a toolkit.
The main reason why I consider gtk to be a better toolkit mainly relates to CORBA. I don’t understand why developers want a reinvention of COBRA. I don’t really think DCOP or DBUS seems like a great idea. Perhaps I’m just naive; I haven’t used it a great deal, but I still think CORBA seems like the way to go, even if its a bit less practical.
Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a toolkit *ever* before that used CORBA. Every other toolkit I’ve seen is similar to kde. Every other toolkit is monolithic, in that the toolkit is designed for use of only one language. Also,every other toolkit that I’ve seen uses a lightweight reinvention of CORBA.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but when I develop programs I want to use functional languages exclusively. In gtk+, the ocaml bindings are usable. Scheme bindings are available. To me that is the ultimate luxury.
I agree with you about gtk+ api being ugly. It should be integrated like qt is, and I’m not sure if using C was a good or bad idea. Gtk should have excellent documentation like qt does. These two advantages of qt are a result of trolltech’s fantastic work, and are likely to remain an advantage over gtk well, for a long long time.
–Tim
What about Eclipse-GTK? I can argue it is the best general purpose development environment available on Linux.
What about Gnumeric? Definitely better than KSpread. Arguable better than oocalc nad Even the venerable Excel.
And people should stop saying things like GIMP is hard because you can not do a simple paint image on it. Heck, I think Photoshop is hard too.
I think things like “You can embed anything into anything” are not necessarily all that. Only geeks use those features. Most people I know do NOT embed spreadsheets in Word (on windows). They just copy and paste into a table.
Most people do not deal so much with ftp, and transparency over ftp does not help them. For web developers that would probably be a killer feature, but even then, maybe for a few only.
Heck, on Windows, Outlook express and outlook do not seem to even share an addressbook. Outlook actually imports the settings from there. As a user, I get turned off more by ugly apps like emacs (yes I am not a developer, so its not of much use to me) and I think for my purposes Gedit is better. It looks beter and works rather predictably too.
I have never seen the need to preview spreadsheet files in the file manager. Pictures, yes, text documents yes, but not spreadsheets, or whatever people decide to preview next. I prefer to have a multimedia player that just works, and works well. On Windows I really hate windows media player, and I prefer to use zoom player for my video, because it is simple and does what it does extremely well. I prefer the GNOME approach of having good apps that work well alone, and have reasonable interoperability with others.
Editing toolbars to me is something I reserve for apps like Gnumeric, or Excel is windows, where I use functions very different from the defaults. I think if your web browser forces you to change the toolbar, then it has a serious problem. The only ‘editing’ I do is to remove the text from under the buttons if its there, and maybe keep ‘priority’ text on the sides of the buttons. But that is me only.
I think what is needed is to provide a platform on which developers can bring what they want to bring to the table. I agree with some of Eugenia’s list, but I think some of those things are not really as pertinent as she makes it seem at times.
For instance, the issue about plugins for totem. The real problem is that people are using wmv as a method of delivery, when Microsoft will not make a Linux codec. Blaming it on GNOME will not solve anything. Besides, Mplayer does it already, and Gstreamer did nto have these capabilities until recently, and its not for inclusion into GNOME until 2.6 anyway.
I see a theme in the responses here. Hackers take the critics to heart, and scream “ignorant!” for things that one shouldn’t have to be obliged to know.
We users ARE bitches about the software, it’s sad, but it’s the true, the same as you hackers are bitches about your programs. We scream because we can’t help because your programs are too difficult to hack on. Why wouldn’t you take our criticism and improve the system? When you’re finished with us, you’ll have a system made for users that’ll make it the preferred desktop ever. It probably won’t be the perfect API, but at least your users will be happy until developers beautify the code and won’t have to bitch again and again, until they give up and use another desktop (as I did).
The first thing that I do when I fire up GNOME (or KDE) is to look for the terminal window icon so that I can get some real work done.
If this gets moderated down, then the moderator really doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say…
The biggest wish is to have better integration between GNOME/KDE. How about a common:
– Multimedia sound subsystem (GStreamer?)
– Sound Server (artsd or MAS?)
– MIME Types (freedesktop mime types in progress)
– Hardware Abstraction Layer (freedesktop HAL)
– Messaging interface (freedesktop DBUS)
– Menus!!!! (???)
– Themes!!!! (???)
Also, lets get some better low level integration in Gnome/KDE. A common way to handle IM’s, contacts, etc. would allow integration between any Evolution & Gaim or Balsa and Jabber.. rather than hacking Evolution & Gaim.
GConf causes me more headaches than anything else in GNOME. It is a good idea, let down by bad implementation. It really hurts bad if your home directory is on NFS. The only way I get get it to work reliably is by forcably killing gconfd and removing its log files before logging in. Even this doesn’t always work if, like me, you routinely log into several different machines at once.
I’d love a proper DB backend. It would be a massive boon for system administrators – changing gconf keys for a network of thousands of machines would be trvial, and no more lock file problems!
i agree with this article; i am a gnome fan, it seems more professional and i like it, but i notice that on my desktop there are more kde apps (kppp, k3b, kate…) than gnome ones…
So you’re saying that having powerful features is useless because most users will never get beyond the lowest common denominator that they are used to in Windows? Great logic, just great…
Plus, I disagree with most of what you say. Take, for example, the transparency issue. In a heavily networked age, its not unconcievable that many people might want to make a personal web page. Heck, I know a lot of people who have a little family page to share stuff like wedding photos. Isn’t it a whole lot easier if they could publish their web page just by saving a file to a place that looks just like a directory, rather than figuring out what the hell an FTP client is? What about the legions of people who need to transparently access network resources in an office or school environment. Isn’t it easier for them if they just have to learn about files and directories, instead of thinking about the distinction between local and network resources?
Another example: my little brother and all his friends use AIM heavily to talk to each other. He’s got about 100 AIM contacts to manage. Meanwhile, my dad has over 1000 business contacts. Wouldn’t it be easier for them if they had contacts just in one place, instead of spread throughout the system?
Even conveniences such as toolbar editing and embedding a re used by more people than you’d think. The average home user might not use these features, but office workers often get at least a couple of days of Office training, and they definately use these features to make their life easier.
@Aeonsfx: Have you used CORBA? Using CORBA to do IPC is like using a buick to swat a fly. Total overkill. CORBA is an incredibly complex and cumbersome API, especially from C++. CORBA is a dinosaur that really needs to die.
one thing that imho needs big improvement
is color prefs management.
The default black on white background is
very bad for my eyes (and probably not only
mine) and changing it is -aehm- nontrivial.
No matter what I do to my .gtkrc* or gnome
control center many text areas will still
display black on white – rendering affected
programms essentially useless for me.
There may exist some theme that would provide
decent colors but downloading and trying
a few dozens themes is not really feasible
to solve such a simple problem.
Both KDE and old style X/Xtk .Xdefault files
work much better in my experience