GNOME 3 Delayed Until September 2010 419
supersloshy writes "Contrary to popular opinion, GNOME 3 will not be released in March next year. It has been delayed until September 2010, six months later. According to the news message, this is because 'our community wants GNOME 3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more appropriate.' GNOME 3's main goal is to re-define the ways people interact with the desktop, mainly through a new UI design (currently called 'GNOME Shell'), while GNOME 2.30, set for release in March, will have a focus on being stable. An early visual tour of GNOME 3 has been posted at Digitizor."
Problems on the horizon for Gnome 3! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, lots of people will be in an uproar! There are millions of problems with Gnome 3! For starters, it won't be enough like KDE 3, so everyone will think it's broken when there's really no problems with it!
Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're looking for Yakuake [kde-apps.org]. It's just like Quake: hit the tilde and a command console drops down from the top.
Not going to comment about the actual product... (Score:3, Interesting)
...but from an Ubuntu scheduling perspective this sounds like good news. The last thing Ubuntu needs for its next LTS release (10.04) is a big new jump to GNOME 3. It'll be nice to have an LTS that will let less bleeding-edge users wait until GNOME 3 has a year and a half of polish, integration, and (most importantly) actual user feedback to upgrade, while still retaining full support
Plus, it'll be just plain interesting to see how Mark Shuttleworth reacts to this frankly rather iffy-looking overhaul. (Oh well, so much for not commenting about it.) Although let's be nice - the screenshots in the link seem to be design mockups, while in the actual screencasts they seem to have solved the billions-of-elipses problem.
What GNOME really needs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who needs GNOME when Windows is affordable (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, yeah. Windows control 99.99% of germs, I mean desktop computers.
I've been freed from Windows for about 4 years now, and there is no way in hell i am going back. I barely tolerate it on my netbook (hardware driver issues), and I install linux on all of my other machines now for these reasons:
1. I spend 95% of my non-work computing time in Firefox.
2. I spend 95% of my work computing time in Firefox and Eclipse.
3. The other 8%, there are linux software for those.
4. I use Virtualbox for the 2% of the time I _need_ Windows.
In return for not using Windows, I gain:
1. I don't worry about firewalls, or anti-virus software.
2. Complete incremental backup of computer to network drive, usb drive, whatever.
3. nfs, and sshfs. They really are awesome. Windows/mac users don't even know what they are missing.
And most importantly:
4. New OS every few months, FREE. FOREVER..
Please fix the window manager (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not going to comment about the actual product.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. (Score:3, Interesting)
Gawd, the hell. I want a system that forces the user to organize his stuff. I'm sick of seeing desktops so cluttered with icons that there's no room for anything else. I wouldn't mind shoving that Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface down their throats. I mean, I make my desktop a mess too, but I clean up my shit eventually. Tons of people (like my sis) simply DON'T, EVER. EVERYTHING GOES ON THE DESKTOP. That's ridiculous. Can't understand the concept of folders? No computer for you!
Re:Leave well alone! (Score:1, Interesting)
Damn right. It is nearly perfect.
I had an old box in the closet and needed it for something, so I powered it up and found that it had Ubuntu 7.10. Went through the upgrade process to 9.10. Since you reboot after each upgrade I played around with the GUI a bit just to look at the changes. The amount of work and improvements over a couple years really is impressive. The interface is actually *complete*.
And now they are going to toss it out?! I am at a loss here...
Re:taking the time to get it right (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. To date, the best Gnome release was version 1.4, which came out just eleven months after the previous release and was a significant improvement in a number of ways. Gnome 2, in contrast, seems to actively get worse with each passing release. Well, except for gnome-terminal. gnome-terminal is actually better. Everything else is worse.
Cellputer (Score:2, Interesting)
And that's it, this. People in the future are going to want their cellphone to be a major part of the computing experience, and when they get home, toss the thing on the desk and it just reopens on the monitor there. The focus should be on making that transition really smooth and consistent.
Right now it is backwards, try to force a desktop OS on the phone or synch it, etc, nuts. The phone os will be more important, the phone hardware will be powerful enough to do most tasks, and the monitor and keyboard on the desk will just be an extension of that primarily, and where your big storage lives. It will *have* to focus on being functional on the phone, then be able to scale up smoothly to a larger screen, and fast.
The next generation practical GUI/desktop therefore should start focusing on that next big step. Whomever gets their first with functionality and smooth transitions and synching wins. Android might be it, but one of the phone OSes will be it for sure, for most people, it won't be gnome or KDE at this point.
NO JOHN RINGO NO. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm seeing this kind of "MMO style" user interface more and more, where the desktop becomes more and more obscured by locked down immovable user interface elements. I've gotten used to the task bar on Windows and the Menu Bar on the Mac and the Panel, I can deal with that, there's one box and it's pretty small and I can stuff everything into it... but Microsoft keeps turning menus into big obtrusive blocks (ribbons and sidebars and the start panel and so on) and this new Gnome scheme seems to be putting this horrid scheme on steroids.
No, no, no, ten thousand times, no.
Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Gnome version of that is Gnome Do [davebsd.com], which started as a project to port Quicksilver to Linux. Quicksilver was purchased by Apple and put into OSX 10.3 several years ago. I use Gnome, and I no longer have any sort of task bar or "start menu"; they are pointless wastes of screen real estate. If I want to chat with my buddy Mike, I just hit meta-space, and then type "ch", which auto-completes to "Chat", then I hit tab and type "mi" which auto-completes to Mike. Gnome-Do will then launch Pidgin and open a chat window for Mike. If I want to listen to Rhapsody In Blue, I hit meta-space, and type "rha", it auto-completes the song name, I hit enter and then Rhythmbox starts playing Gershwin. It really is an amazing riff on all the quick launchers. It's much better than Spotlight (Apple's version of Quicksilver); I wrote a plugin for Gnome-Do last summer -- it's all written in C#/Mono and very accessible for coders of any level.
Re:taking the time to get it right (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't Confuse "Utmost" with "Upmost" [homestead.com]
Re:KDE 4! (Score:3, Interesting)
I was thinking of it somewhat differently. My thought was:
"I'm glad that they aren't doing this for a year. By that time KDE4 might be nearly as useful as KDE3.0 was."
FWIW, I'm currently using Gnome, but I'd used a KDE desktop since the days of Gnome1.x. (When they changed that out, I switched to KDE...over the same kind of usability issues that have currently caused me to switch back to Gnome.)
It's not merely bugs, it's design issues. Interface designers don't seem to be able to design a new interface without including so many usability problems that it's nearly always a disaster.
(N.B.: The KDE2.x->KDE3.x wasn't a major change in the interface. The major changes were under the hood, and showed up as bugs. There are known ways of dealing with bugs. They don't work perfectly, but they exist. There don't seem to be known ways of dealing with basic UI design errors. Not even ways to collect the information that would let you know that you've made a mistake.)
To me this looks like a massive redesign of the interface. And it looks terrible. (Quite esthetic, but terrible from the usability standpoint.) I could be wrong, because I'm judging from still images, and I don't know how or why those images were selected, or how common it is for the system to get in that state.
The dual bar design is excellent. It allows one to have a constant display ot the most common tools used, and the currently active applications, in a very small area of the screen. The images showed render the screen unusable when that information is being displayed. Quite very much not good. Twice as bas as double plus ungood.
So I'm really glad that it won't show up for another year. Maybe by then they'll have realized a few of their mistakes. And I don't mean bugs, I mean design errors. Until then ... well, the latest revision of KDE4 was approaching the usability of Gnome. It still has a ways to go, but a couple of more revisions and I may be able to switch back to it.
P.S.: Eye-candy is all very well, but it doesn't have much, if anything, to do with usability. It often seems to be an inverse relationship. And usability trumps eye-candy any day in my use.