GNOME Shell 2.29 Brings A Lot Of Improvements

[V!NCENT]

I tried all WM's and DE's and keep doing that because I want to know what the developments are and because you should not bash anything if you don't know what the fsck you're talking about. Oh and I love KDE and I think that Gnome sucks.

That said I'd love to see some desktop innovation. KDE has shown their shit, not it is time for Gnome...

From what I've seen:
+Lots of potential good for touch screens
+New breakaway from the traditional desktop idea
-It's awful
-I think it will harm productivity like hell
-It's still... Gnome...

I'd love to see if it's any good, once released.
If so KDE can copy it as a Plasma shell in about a single release time windows.
If it sucks then Gnome will suck more than it already does today xD

So Gnome... bring it on!

[V!NCENT]

YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8gBxv31vYo

[fanATic]

Yo, V!ncent, I'm really happy for you, and I'ma let you trolling, but KDE sux.

GNOME 2.28

pros - stable, clean interface.

cons - devs are deaf for user requests and suggestions, maybe I'me wrong but that's my impression. It's hard sometimes to customize look, let's say, to change main menu icon, like Ubuntu logo, in KDE is couple of mouse clicks away. You can't erase and/or change folder name or file if are in Save_as dialog, KDE can do that.
Brasero sux big time.

KDE 4

pros - bling, bling, all in your face customization. Devs listen users. Some apps are great, like Dolphin (file preview, split view etc.), Ktorrent, K3B, Kate... KDE is nice GNU/Linux desktop environment showcase. Unlike GNOME, they have their office suite, Koffice. GNOME just adopted OO.o.

cons - still ugly, KDE 3 and before was fugly. Unstable sometimes.


I mainly use GNOME, because it suits my needs and I like it. Sometimes I
test KDE, Xfce or wm's. First impresssion on Shell, cool, nice, second look, it sucks, after I tried it, give me back two panels. It's far from HIG and usability. I expect that concept will improve in final release.

[Remco]

Unlike GNOME, they have their office suite, Koffice. GNOME just adopted OO.o.

GNOME has GNOME Office, consisting of Abiword, Gnumeric, Inkscape, GIMP, and optionally Planner, GNU Cash and Dia. Three of those applications are programs that I need, (Inkscape, GIMP and Dia) and which do not have an OpenOffice equivalent. But I prefer Writer and Calc over Abiword or Gnumeric.

[Joe Sixpack]

GNOME has GNOME Office, consisting of Abiword, Gnumeric, Inkscape, GIMP, and optionally Planner, GNU Cash and Dia. Three of those applications are programs that I need, (Inkscape, GIMP and Dia) and which do not have an OpenOffice equivalent. But I prefer Writer and Calc over Abiword or Gnumeric.

None of which are actually Gnome apps. You could just as well install QTcurve and call them KDE office if you wanted to.

[leidola]

None of which are actually Gnome apps. You could just as well install QTcurve and call them KDE office if you wanted to.

Btw. What makes an app a gnome app?

[liam]

I actually think the devs have been pretty good about taking user input. I've been following development somewhat by building when I here of a new release and reading the blogs on Planet Gnome. There are a bunch of people who have contributed to the mockups of Gnome Shell, some who, from their comments, seemed to not be affiliated with Gnome Shell at all, but made requests, implemented them(or created a mockup) and they were added.
As, I believe it was, drag said, gnome has actually had fairly extensive usability tests performed. If you check out Planet Gnome now and look at the last 10 to 15 posts, you'll see the interest that at least one designer has in making things look/feel good.
At the moment GS is usable, IMHO, but not incredibly stable. In my experience, having just finished checking out KDE 4.4 a few days ago, I would say GS is about 85% or so as stable/polished as the newest KDE release(for clarification, I used KDE exclusively for a couple of days with my normal workflow consisting of text editor, browser, music, etc.). Kwin crashed many times(at least 4 times that I can specifically remember). Plasma was quite buggy(using GeForce 8400GS w/190.42) from rendering errors(drawing past borders) to lag(folder scroll on desktop has improved mightily though) and unkillable behavior(I enabled a bouncing ball and tried to get rid of it - I couldn't find the specific, or closely related, process running). Also, I really displike the cluttered appearance of a number of KDE apps, and it's not functionality that I dislike, it's the seeming lack of restraint of the designers. A number of you have scoffed about the "ease" of use of GConf, well, I actually really like it. It's a nice unified place to alter settings for every app that puts in an entry. It's not rocket science, for the most part. If you want to change a setting you probably want to look in Apps, and from there find what you are looking for(or use the search tool). Using GConf, Gnome becomes quite configurable, but it isn't necessary for the most part, thus it is hidden away.
Anyway, it is quite late.

Best/Liam

[kraftman]

drag said, gnome has actually had fairly extensive usability tests performed. If you check out Planet Gnome now and look at the last 10 to 15 posts, you'll see the interest that at least one designer has in making things look/feel good.

Someone probably forget to mention there are also usability tests in KDE.

[val-gaav]

lol removing things even though many people complain with valid reasons link1, link2 is IMHO not usability.

If you compare the situation KDE 3.5 was confusing with too many options in many places, Gnome is too simplistic, that it just doesn't allow to do the job.
Now personally I like the kde4 way where they try to find a way in between of those two ways. That is IMHO the right way.

I'm sick and tired of hearing how kde blows you away with gazillion options while this is simply not true for 4.x series.

[yotambien]

One point, though: native look & feel is not overrated. While it starts with trivial apperance (e.g. firefox menus not fading out on win32) it goes all the way down to e.g. keyring integration for storing passwords, keyboard navigation, accessibility... Proper integration is *hard* and cannot be really achieved with toolkits such as Qt or wxWidgets. Needless to say, not many applications manage that.

That's true, but I somehow doubt that people who bitch about GTK applications not looking good in KDE have that in mind. At least, without making any further assumptions, it seems to me that they are just complaining about colours, icons and not-so-important stuff like that. Which I find funny, because I use GTK programs, QT3 ones, QT4, Motif, wxWidgets, Java...everything that fits the bill. While it's true that some of them suck a lot more than others and that it would be cool to have some integration between them, my first concern is to get my crap done.

Once that I have what I need I can start worrying about integration. You are right, it is important. For instance, it definitely is an obstacle to productivity; you have to remember different sets of shortcuts, cope with completely different GUI behaviour, different configuration systems, whatever. All that puts an extra strain and complexity layer on the users, who should just need to focus on their work and not on the tools.

Then there is the annoying thing about loading a bunch of, say, KDE libraries and daemons when you just launch a simple editor...oh, well.

A number of you have scoffed about the "ease" of use of GConf, well, I actually really like it. It's a nice unified place to alter settings for every app that puts in an entry. It's not rocket science, for the most part. If you want to change a setting you probably want to look in Apps, and from there find what you are looking for(or use the search tool). Using GConf, Gnome becomes quite configurable, but it isn't necessary for the most part, thus it is hidden away.

A lot of the complains just go around the lines of "look at that M$-like Gnome shit". I can't say I particularly like it, but it does its job. And from a different point of view, it may be the way forward. I'm thinking now about the comments from Theodore Ts'o about the way some applications (DEs, actually) handle the configuration by constantly writing to a ton of dot files in ~/. Well, apparently that may lead to disaster if something goes wrong, and having a centralised, database-managed solution is the way to go. (Note: I don't actually know if this is what Gnome is currently doing with Gconf).