GNOME 3.0 May Not Come Until September 2010

[BlackStar]

Between Windows 7, MacOS and Kde4...... what is the purpose of gnome? We don't need another Windows 98 user interface do we?

Guys, can someone please answer this? Why do KDE users see it fit to bash Gnome every instance they can get? Has it something to do with insecurity (small e-penis I guess) or is there something in KDE that turns otherwise normal people into trolls?

The funny thing is that the bashing is mostly baseless:

• No, Gnome looks nothing like Win98.
• No, KDE is not prettier than Gnome - don't try to project your personal opinion onto everyone. For example, I think that the default KDE4.3 theme is fucking dreadful in colors and design, with plasmids being the only part that looks nice. (Hint: see the I think part in there?)
• No, KDE is not more usable than Gnome in any meaningful way.

Gnome 2.0 game out in 2002. In 7 years, can you honestly name me 5 major improvements?

Evolution, Accessibility, GStreamer (with automatic codec installer), Seahorse, Orca, Tomboy, Cheese, GVFS, Brasero, fast user switching, tabbed Nautilus.

Oops, went over the 5 mark there, didn't I? These are best-of-breed applications and major features that have been introduced gradually over the lifetime of Gnome 2.x. Gnome 2.28 looks nothing like Gnome 2.0 - unless you are a troll, that is.

Back on topic, I'd support a September release. Gnome shell is looking extremely promising even in 2.28, but there's a lot of work left until it can surpass the default desktop in usability.

[ioannis]

under the bonnet...

It's nice to see overhauling the user interface, but in my opinion, the biggest problem of GNOME is under the bonnet. They need to modernise GTK+ and first and foremost start with the programming language in use.

There are endless debates on this subject. It all boils down to statements like "you can do with C anything you can do with any other 'modern' language" and "you can use one of the many language bindings if you wish".

statement 1: It is very frustrating to hear such a statement, especially from veterans. The expressiveness of a proper OOP is unmatched by any GObject hacks.
statement 2: Bindings are usually out-of-sync, but most importantly they merely expose the GTK+ API to the language, rather than integrate with it (i.e. take full advantage of the design paradigms the language brings). Take a look at Ruby and Python bindings for instance.

The KDE guys went with C++ and at the time it was a reasonable choice. Although, better than C, not being dynamically bind means they had to resort to their own little hacks (signals, slots, object-properties, etc with moc)

In my opinion, a modern Desktop/Application environment should be build on a dynamically bind language(e.g. Objective-C). I would go as far as saying, interpreted as well (Ruby, Python, etc)...

[R3MF]

"Reload this Page GNOME 3.0 May Not Come Until September 2010"

Is anyone surprised?

Meaning no disrespect to the Gnome devs, the target was optimistic even if the goals of Gnome3 were not as ambitious as those of KDE4.

And while I am sure Gnome3 (aka 2.32) will be usable, I am pretty certain it will be usable in the same way that KDE 4.1 was usable.

Given lessons learnt and more modest ambitions I'll be charitable and say that Gnome will achieve their KDE 4.3 moment in spring 2010 with Gnome 3.1, which is still a shorter time than KDE managed with their 4 series.

Gnome - KDE
2.6.30 - 4.0
3.0 - 4.1
--- - 4.2
3.1 - 4.3

[AliBaba]

In 7 years, can you honestly name me 5 major improvements?

Go and search yourself, lazy. Gnome has evolved constantly in the last few years.



As far as W98-look-alike claims are concerned, it's IMHO stupid to compare a more than 12 years old operating system to a modern and highly flexible desktop environment.

Seriously, every user can easily make his system look like Vista/7 or give it a completely unique appearance on the other hand. There's no need to bash gnome developers for their decision to give it a simple and clean look that will make every user understand its elements functionality at the first look.



Btw, @next9, this is no "real and actual vanilla gnome", it's Debian's design (with only a few changes though).

[val-gaav]

Guys, can someone please answer this? Why do KDE users see it fit to bash Gnome every instance they can get? Has it something to do with insecurity (small e-penis I guess) or is there something in KDE that turns otherwise normal people into trolls?

Nope it's because KDE is underminded by Gnome the same way Linux is by Microsoft and Windows. Using Linux changes people into trolls that bash Windows and using KDE makes them hate Gnome for various simliar reasons...

The funny thing is that the bashing is mostly baseless:

• No, Gnome looks nothing like Win98.
• No, KDE is not prettier than Gnome - don't try to project your personal opinion onto everyone. For example, I think that the default KDE4.3 theme is fucking dreadful in colors and design, with plasmids being the only part that looks nice. (Hint: see the I think part in there?)
• No, KDE is not more usable than Gnome in any meaningful way.

Here we go into opinions and statistics... But seriously default KDE is a lot prettier then default gnome... Oxygen is by far the first default linux desktop environment theme that doesn't suck. Both gnome and kde3 deafaults imho were quite bad. Also I tested this on few windows users and showing them default kde4 and gnome the pretty one answer was kde and gnome looked to them like some old windows ...

[BlackStar]

Nope it's because KDE is underminded by Gnome the same way Linux is by Microsoft and Windows. Using Linux changes people into trolls that bash Windows and using KDE makes them hate Gnome for various simliar reasons...

Makes sense.

Here we go into opinions and statistics... But seriously default KDE is a lot prettier then default gnome... Oxygen is by far the first default linux desktop environment theme that doesn't suck. Both gnome and kde3 deafaults imho were quite bad. Also I tested this on few windows users and showing them default kde4 and gnome the pretty one answer was kde and gnome looked to them like some old windows ...

Let's just agree to disagree here

This blog post summarizes my thoughts pretty well:

And then you open a window:



It is.. gray. There is no glass. There are no gradients. There is no depth. There is no elegance. There is just gray. It says: "I am kicking Windows 95's ass! Barely!"

I just don't get it. How can half of your desktop (let's call it "Plasma") be so beautiful, while the other half (let's call it "the stuff that is always going to be covering up Plasma") be so ugly and uninspired?

[kraftman]

Nope it's because KDE is underminded by Gnome the same way Linux is by Microsoft and Windows. Using Linux changes people into trolls that bash Windows and using KDE makes them hate Gnome for various simliar reasons...

It's not a rule. There are many Gnome and Windows trolls, maybe even more at least when comes to Windows.

[kraftman]

It is.. gray. There is no glass. There are no gradients. There is no depth. There is no elegance. There is just gray. It says: "I am kicking Windows 95's ass! Barely!"

I just don't get it. How can half of your desktop (let's call it "Plasma") be so beautiful, while the other half (let's call it "the stuff that is always going to be covering up Plasma") be so ugly and uninspired?

In my opinion Dolphin is quite elegant. Who the hell wants gradients and glass in a simple file manager? :P Btw. what other file manager (or the stuff that is always going to be covering up desktop) looks better using defaults? Gnome not, xfce not, e17 not, so? :>

More from this blog:

Yes, there are some problems with it. The buttons do not highlight in any way on hover. There are no tooltips, so I don't even know what the top two buttons do. From what I can tell, they do absolutely nothing. But it really lives up to KDE's reputation of eye candy.

Maybe few year old child would have problems to realize what mentioned buttons do (or it would be just obvious and yes, they do...) - resize, rotate and preferences, so why someone is lying?

[NeoBrain]

This blog post summarizes my thoughts pretty well:

I've been thinking about this as well - e.g. plain "complete window transparency" just doesn't cut it*, we'd need some API like Aero for Linux to improve the window decorations, which apart from round window corners really didn't see much innovation in the past few years.

* what I mean with this: it's not the whole window which should be transparent, but only it's menus and borders and stuff.

[L33F3R]

iight kde fanboys. show me a very sexy windows 98. come on.