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- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -2/+26I really don't understand the need for dconf and gbus (especially when dbus and gconf exist and work so well). Ephy+Webkit=Gnome Love, and Gvfs is a huge improvement but it's nowhere even close to being ready for human consumption...
It's exciting, but they're a while off. I'll be much happier when the Gnome devs finally depreciate Bonobo and start migrating everything over to dbus, rewrite Nautilus from scratch (or at least take Thunar and turn it into a real file manager and not Finder-for-Gnome), and fix the sprawling usage of GLists everywhere a GSList or a flat array would work just as well (and *better*).
Some things that excite me that didn't make this list:
Cheese: the new Gnome "Photobooth" clone (you really don't get that from the name, or at least I didn't at first). Uses gstreamer to push camera images through filters. What's missing? OpenGL-based filters. http://live.gnome.org/Cheese
Telepathy is rather disappointing, what's better? Libpurple. It's Telepathy, only it's already been implemented, and all of the code is in one place instead of 6 different databases/version control systems. The only bit that isn't done is a simple libpurple daemon that connects to dbus and lets you use your "telepathic" client with it (which would be *huge*).
And lastly, Cairo. It's not Gnome, but it's behind Gnome's toolkit, and it's getting faster and less buggy with every release, and it makes 2d graphics fun again. - ChrisRX, on 10/10/2007, -1/+20Has this guy never heard of capitalisation? 2 shift keys and 1 caps lock, use any one you like.
- cornflakepirate, on 10/10/2007, -0/+17You know that GTK has pluggable theme engines?
- amoore260, on 10/10/2007, -5/+17Gnome needs to step up to the plate!!!! KDE 4 has me taking a serious look at KDE for the first time. I've been a gnome user for the last 3 years but I see little innovation with Gnome from a user point of view.
- stalefries, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11Telepathy is meant as a way for other applications to get in on the presence notification stuff, without rolling their own solution. Libpurple is actually working on integrating _with_ telepathy.
- bieber, on 10/10/2007, -1/+11Oh wow. Am I the only one who thinks Vala looks like it's going to be the *****? My biggest complaint about GNOME has always been that coding a proper app in anything other than C is a huge pain to set up; at least QT natively supports C++.
- mastastealth, on 10/10/2007, -4/+13The list didn't jump at me as an average Gnome user. I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and I know how to work my way around in Linux, so I'm not a complete noob, but the only things I saw that looked interesting were what someone commented on. Telepathy, Tracker, Gbus, and GVFS (which I can't even remember what it's for). I tried Kubuntu a while ago, and KDE is nice, but Gnome's simplicity really brought me in. However, after seeing all this stuff about the new KDE4 I am seriously considering it another chance. Gnome has been pretty much the same for a while now (since Warty) with a few admittedly nice apps coming up. But they should seriously consider doing something more concrete about Gnome 3...
What I'd personally like to see (and it's not all Gnome either) in a Gnome 3 desktop:
-Gimp revamp, just clone Photoshop for pete's sake...
-Composite, it's the future
-Pidgin, voice and video support already!
-Nautilus, I hear Thunar is good. Dolphin is looking nice, how about a GTK version?
-Video Editor? Diva looked good, haven't heard about it in a while though.
-GTK, after hearing KDE will start using some sort of CSS type of skinning, oh man...GTK needs to get a revamp as well (and I don't even know the programming aspect of it, but I hear that could use an update too)
-Cairo, everywhere. Please.
-Apps! KDE's already updated most of their games and stuff. Gnome could use the Gsane frontend already, a better image viewer, etc.
Oh well. I could probably just install all that myself...but KDE4 will have a lot of stuff already there. Hopefully this kicks up the competition a bit. - cornflakepirate, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9*rolls eyes* Not everybody is American.
- cornflakepirate, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8According to the article, dconf has significant performance benefits over gconf. gbus seems a bit redunant though :/
- jackhole, on 10/10/2007, -1/+9Across-the-board portability and performance enhancements as well. KDE was a bit slimmer than Gnome in the past, now the Gnome and GTK devs have some serious work to do so XFCE and KDE don't eat their lunch.
- zeebo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Well, a gimp revamp is underway (http://www.venturecake.com/gimps-major-ui-revamp/), but I don't think you're going to get the exact carbon copy clone you want. It looks like its going to be more the gimp/inkscape hybrid UI that I'd like to see. As for composite and voice and video for pidgin, those are coming.
I'm not sure why Nautilus needs to be replaced, its a damn good file manager now, dolphin's file manager UI looks like a clone of recent nautilus browser versions. I know some people want paned file manager windows, but spatial gives you an N-pane file manager, so that seems kind of like a non-issue to me. Perhaps somebody will work on it once they figure out how to make one that works with the HIG.
Video editor? Oh hell yeah, we need one of those. I'm still waiting for an easy way to take a bunch of video files and turn them into a DVD easily.
As for the GTK and Cairo complaints, yeah that's in the works as well. - jackhole, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Yes. Gnome has been running heavy for years now, thus the rise of XFCE as a new GTK toolkit DE. The difference in speed, memory usage and stability isn't exceptional, but its there (http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html). Witness also Patrick Volkerding almost dropping Gnome out of Slackware in 2005 because it had become too hard for him to package properly. That Gnome is doing so well in distributions like Red Hat and Ubuntu is due to its focus on user simplicity and on some terrific work from distro packagers and bug wranglers.
- jdubjdub, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8Note that the "no icons on the desktop" thing is an Ubuntu vendor change. By default, GNOME has home, trash and a couple of other icons on the desktop. The visibility setting exists for administrators to lock down their user desktops, but are not exposed in the UI as the default GNOME setting is likely to be appropriate for pretty much all users. The Ubuntu folks have made a different design decision, which I personally like, but I understand that others do not. They haven't provided a visible setting for it, probably due to lack of user demand.
- shavenlunatic, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Those crazy americanz, they really love their Zees
- democracysucks, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Telepathy is promising enough. It's young, so it will be a while, but it's got a lot of development going on. Besides, libpurple sort of seems to be on the way out...seems people want *better* support instead of *more* (protocol) support.
I agree about Epiphany using Webkit as a backend--makes me smile inside. Does anyone know if it will be the default backend, or will Epiphany still be using Gecko (or maybe XULrunner) in 2.20? - Samurailink3, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7KDE4 looks amazing. But being a gnome user myself, I'm looking forward to the progress they're making. That said, I'm going to check out KDE4 as soon as it gets out of beta.
- jdubjdub, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7We don't need a "GNOME 3.0" to deliver awesome new stuff for our users. Right now, we're delivering sweet new features -- perhaps not earth-shattering things, but every upgrade feels great -- EVERY SIX MONTHS, to the day.
While that is happening, a heck of a lot of infrastructure work has been going on behind the scenes (the most recent of which Ryan mentioned in his post). That infrastructure work is being done to drive the desktop experience forward and deliver really awesome features to our users down the track. Some of the most innovative work in the FLOSS desktop field is happening as a result of GNOME hackers fixing stuff from the kernel all the way up the stack -- and much of this work is the basis for the oddly named new KDE APIs. :-)
In addition to that, there's a huge amount of work going on in the GNOME Mobile and Online Desktop scenes, which will provide direct and indirect benefits to end users (be they desktop or mobile users).
Did you know that there are now more developers employed to work on the GNOME platform focusing on mobile use cases than desktop use cases? It's having a huge impact on innovation in our platform, as well as improving performance and memory usage... and those changes will greatly improve the desktop experience, too.
We may not be yelling from the rooftops about all these things, but there's no doubt that over the last three years GNOME has been driving the FLOSS desktop experience forward, and has a clear vision for the amazing stuff we'll be delivering over the next few years.
The best bit? You won't have to wait for some earth-shaking, scorched-earth, massive-rewrite 3.0 release to see the benefits of our work. We're going to keep delivering incremental releases EVERY SIX MONTHS. :-)
See also: http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero - democracysucks, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8Composite is best left to Compiz if you ask me (KDE 4's composite sucks compared to Compiz), Pidgin isn't part of the GNOME project (even if your favorite distro includes it by default), and on, and on...
You say "KDE 4 will have a lot of stuff already there," but I'm wondering what you're talking about. Especially looking at your list of items, KDE actually seems to suck worse than GNOME on most of them, except perhaps on skinning (even though both KDE and GNOME suffer from horrible custom themes). Oh, and QT 4.3 certainly is a bit ahead of GTK performance-wise.
Beyond that, GNOME's doing a lot of great things. I read all the hype about KDE 4, but I don't see anything great about it. I don't want to get into a flame war, so I won't list all the things GNOME does better than KDE 4, but I have yet to encounter a single "innovative" or "groundbreaking" feature, or some "killer app" that's really going to make a difference. Let's face it, most people just want new graphics, widgets, and transparency. That's far from innovative, though. I even asked the KDE fanboys over at the Debian forums (they admitted to being fanboys) what they were so excited about in KDE 4, and they couldn't list anything besides "backend" stuff.
Anyway, I think once everybody tries KDE 4 and realizes it's just like KDE 3, they'll finally stop talking about it. It's like how the mainstream media were obsessed with the PS3 launch, talking about how powerful it was and all, and then when it came out and the reality sunk in, they stopped talking about it overnight.
DISCLAIMER: I use both GNOME and KDE, and am excited about the changes in both desktops. - cornflakepirate, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5They are all mostly back-end/developer-centric projects, so the user won't really be affected until they start to get used in applications. That could take a while, but it's exciting in the long term.
- Stonekeeper, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5lol! You better tell the beagle developers!
- democracysucks, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5I don't know about your distro, but in Debian, you should be able to install the xulrunner-gnome-support package, then uninstall Firefox/Iceweasel, and have Epiphany run using xulrunner. Of course, it's still Gecko, but at least it means Epiphany can run by itself.
- buggu, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5I use Gnome right now primarily for its simplicity and because its interface isn't a mess of icons scattered around, like KDE. Though the more I use KDE applications, the more I realize how far behind Gnome is as a desktop. KDE is without a doubt a full desktop solution. They maintain pretty much every application that you will need in a default install, and they are always doing lots of interesting stuff with it. I'll even go as far as saying that most KDE apps are leagues ahead of Gnome apps (Kopete > Pidgin, Konqueror > Nautilus, Amarok> Rythmbox.... so on and so forth). The problem with Gnome is that its suffering from a lack of interest from many of its users. Look around and you will see many Gnome users excited for KDE4 more than Gnome 3, and that's for good reason. KDE4 looks to be innovating in a lot of departments - so be it the backend and the stuff for developers, or just the end user. More importantly they are addressing concerns expressed by the community for a long time (Interface design, simplified interface, dropping of "K" application naming convention etc.) Unless Gnome adopts some sort of a big release strategy and does the same, they're going to have a lot of users migrate over to the other desktop. And there's nothing really wrong in that, Linux being about choice and all - but if this is what Gnome has to offer for a release still far away (Telepathy, dconf and other projects that are undeniably more appealing to developers more than users), then it will be very dissapointing to see it left so far behind in competition.
- melve, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Besides better performance, I also think dconf is supposed to be lower level than gconf and not dependent on Gnome libraries, meaning other desktop environments could use it too. It would be cool if linux had a unified configuration system. It would make it a lot easier for Gnome applications to run under KDE and vice versa. I don't know if there are any plans for KDE using this though.
- melve, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5It looks like the list was mainly under-the-hood infrastructure improvements. Most of these won't give the average user anything new, but will give developers better tools to work with. Hopefully it speeds up development of the visible parts of Gnome.
- democracysucks, on 10/10/2007, -6/+10And what innovation are you seeing in KDE 4? Transparency and widgets?
- cosmotron, on 10/10/2007, -8/+12I think you may be confusing GTK with QT...
- cornflakepirate, on 10/10/2007, -3/+7"there's no way of adding a "Home" icon onto the nautilus desktop without messing with gconf"
Try drag-and-drop Home Folder from the Places menu :) - geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Nautilus is the shame of the Free Software world. It was revolutionary back when Eazel released it, and it slowly got older, and older, to where Nautilus is now basically in maintenance mode; and not a very good one at that. It leaks memory like a sieve, uses tons and tons of memory when accessing large folders (I've clocked it at over 200MB for a folder with 2000 photos, that's absurd), and its UI is a carbon copy of Window's Explorer from the pre-2000 era, and in Spatial mode it confuses the hell out of new people and Mac users alike.
- digitalmob, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Many of the higher level apps are being written using C#/Mono now. This is great for a more rapid development of apps without much of a speed penalty.
- regeya, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Not sure why people are rating mornon down (at -2 when I read the comment.) Thunar is indeed a file manager from the XFCE project, for XFCE, but it's usable in a GNOME environment. That doesn't make it a 'finder for gnome.'
http://thunar.xfce.org/index.html
The thing that makes Thunar so neat is that it works almost exactly like the newer GTK+ file dialogs. It has some rough edges but I've found I can handle most of my file management tasks with one window, and in extreme cases I need to open two. Minor complaints I have with Nautilus have been fixed with Thunar, and it's a lot cleaner imho than OS X Finder.
So no, it's not finder for gnome, and it's not a gnome problem. Why the mornon hate? - sremick, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Strangely enough, the screensavers thing bugs me a lot. It's not that I think they actually "save" the screen, and I do feel the CPU cycles could be better spent on other things... but there's a certain eye-candy value and there are a bunch of cool screensavers that allow your computer to basically scream "THIS IS NOT A WINDOWS PC" that the Gnome desktop from a distance just doesn't do.
Unfortunately, there are a bunch of REALLY REALLY lame ones too. Not being able to randomize from a custom list annoys me. You can select one, or randomize from ALL, but that's it. - clark1001, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5Anyone care to translate all of these acronyms and exotic words into everyday user-speak?
Here's what I would like from my Ubuntu box:
Better wireless - although I suspect my router might suck
Some kind of wrapper for bluetooth - I have to issue a command every time I wake up my computer to recognize my mouse
An "all video and audio ever created will now work" package - sure, it could be "third party", just do it
Pivot tables in Openoffice.org
A GUI for editing xorg, hosts, and all those other config files
That's it for me. - srg13, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3"An "all video and audio ever created will now work" package - sure, it could be "third party", just do it"
Get the gstreamer 'bad' and 'ugly' packages. Doesn't sound too good, but I've had no problems.
"Better wireless"
Ask your wireless card manufacturer!
"A GUI for editing xorg, hosts, and all those other config files"
The new version of X.org that will be included with the next Ubuntu should fix this, and there's a gui for setting up multiple displays etc.
As for hosts, it can be edited in the Network control panel, but I much prefer 'sudo nano /etc/hosts' - it takes me about 10 seconds to add a domain o it.. - miyamotofreak, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Webkit+Epiphany is interesting and would erase the need to install firefox.
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3...except for when it's not. The developers are too concentrated on making their own messaging solutions without realizing there's one in place working now, and that integrating it (and all of their projects into one version control system) should be their #1 priority, so they can actually release something this year and not look like a bunch of talk with zero action.
- Skeithy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3GNOME takes things slow and steady for good reason, but its going to cost them users. KDE 4 will improve many fold over every shortcoming of KDE 3, but where does that leave gnome?
- DrBob, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3There's also the fact that many people use Firefox for the extensions, and Epiphany just can't provide that.
- mastastealth, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Your right, a lot of it is on the graphical side (like I already mentioned, I could probably install all the stuff myself) but for instance:
KDE4's new vector engine (from QT4 right?), Gnome 3 would also have everything nice and smooth by using Cairo
Composite, I guess they should just replace Metacity with Compiz Fusion? KWin has the compostie built in...
The new built in desktop engine seems cool. Why can't Gnome 3 integrate gDesklets? And make it more user-friendly (DesktopX on Windows is way easier to use, for me anyway)
Apps, besides vamping up the current Gnome games with a nicer UI, maybe some multiplayer, add more apps people want. GPhotoshop, Diva, how 'bout a nice alternative to K3B in GTK? I can't remember if they part of KDE or not, but K3B, Amarok, Kino all seem to be standard defaults for a KDE distro.
I'm not saying Gnome sucks either, I enjoy it very much on my laptop. I would just like to see some newer stuff from them, so they don't fall behind once KDE4 comes out. - jhodapp, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Gross, who ever wanted to copy the GUI of Windows XP? It's atrocious taste.
- sukimashita, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2The future improvements in underlying technologies for GNOME look good, however individual GNOME projects appear to be a bit out of sync with that new stuff. Like gnome-media being old, gnome-panel without real composite support and much more.
Yeah I know, you can't really complain in FOSS except by contributing with patches and code. ;) - SteveMax, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3"but are not exposed in the UI as the default GNOME setting is likely to be appropriate for pretty much all users."
This is the main problem with Gnome. They hide settings based on someone's opinion on "what is good for most users". If you try to please most of the people all the time, you end up displeasing everybody at least once; almost everybody will have to go to the abomination that is the "registry" to change something. Give me the right to disagree with their decisions and use my desktop the way I want to, or I'll use something else. KDE allows me to have *my* desktop instead of *theirs*, and this is why I use it. - zerblat, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Create file launcher that points to trash:
- skankin231, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4I have no idea what any of this means, but I use Linux. Does that mean it's ready for the desktop?
- SteveMax, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2Not "almost dropping", he dropped it. For some time now Slackware offers only KDE, XFCE, and a few pure window managers.
- DrBob, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1xorg.conf means that settings such as your keyboard layout persist. (Otherwise it would be the default en_US every time you boot.) You should only need to edit it once, though, so as you say, I don't think a GUI's desperately necessary.
- uzytkownik, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yes - it will. gtk-webcore is still in alpha stage and it's quite unstable. At least according to authors ;-)
- bilbravo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yes. I guess it's cool to not use capitalization or punctuation.
- regeya, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Indeed. I think it'll be time for yet another "spring cleaning" with GNOME. KDE4 is looking really SWEET, and it looks like they're getting way cleaner and more user-oriented than KDE's been since the 1.x days. They should have never started chasing GNOME's tail when GNOME's main "benefits" were features galore and gaudy themes, imho. KDE1 was WONDERFUL from a usability standpoint.
- init100, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I agree. NetworkManager works really well for me. It connects to the appropriate wireless network when unplugged from the wired network, and reconnects automatically when I plug the wired network back in.
- init100, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1"Pivot tables in Openoffice.org"
You mean like the Data Pilot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Calc#DataPilot
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1228426,00.html/ -
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