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."
Re:taking the time to get it right (Score:1, Insightful)
Um... taking time doesn't necessarily mean it gets done right.
See Also: Windows Vista
Re:taking the time to get it right (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad that we can make such broad sweeping generalizations these days, that Microsoft now represents the entire private sector.
How can xterm be improved? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTH (Score:5, Insightful)
Lose the ability to 1click to open aps. Clock takes a huge chunk of real estate. The aps button is needlessly large and boring text. Opening a common folder takes more time now. This is just my first look at it but still wtf...
GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we laugh or cry? It's like KDE and Gnome are in some sort of frantic struggle for who can botch desktop Linux the most.
I hope some commercial company like Google puts grownups to work like they did with Android on some replacement for these two basketcase projects.
Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its hard to know when to stop. Windows has been done. This is evidenced by the two most recent versions which don't actually do anything more than XP. It may be the same with gnome. This happens all the time, and not just in software.
There is always FVWM for me. That will never change.
Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't what I'm missing in Gnome. I'm missing desktop sharing and conferencing software like Livemeeting. I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
Instead, some *person* for want of a better word, thinks I need to have yet another new way to select the same applications, wants to "improve" (i.e. remove the choice from) the task list to be *more* application-centric (so retrograde it's laughable).. What a waste of time. What about an Object-Oriented or task-oriented desktop? How about some *actual* innovation? Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant;.
Re:WTH (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of it's just a big mental jump, and I think I could get used to it, especially if some of the appearance and behaviour can be customised.
One thing grabbed me right away, though. The idea of slightly minimising the desktop while I'm working with the menu is interesting. But in the examples, look how every item in the menu is truncated. It's all "Home..." and "OpenO..." and "Docu..."
That alone would drive me crazy. If nothing fits in your menus, then your menus are badly designed. If there isn't a option to show just a list, instead of a grid of too-large icons with ellipses everywhere, it's definitely a no for me. Might seem trivial, but I'm going to be looking at that annoyance a LOT.
Re:WTH (Score:5, Insightful)
I respect that they're aiming for stability (quite different from what KDE did), but I'm not sure I like the direction their UI is going. I'll probably hop to KDE or LXDE.
Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant
If the was Microsoft, and you didn't know better, then perhaps it's fair to say you are being "force fed" this change. However, this is OSS, and nobody is forcing you to use Gnome Shell. You have options: stick with Gnome 2.x, use XFCE, KDE or any of the other window managers available. Just stop whinging about how you don't like it.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they're trying to innovate and do something new and different. I don't share your doubts but if I did, I would rather give them the benefit of any doubt then criticize before I had even tried the software. It seems to me that they're in a tough spot: do what UIs have been doing for a long time and get accused of copying rather than doing something new, or do something new and get bad word from people who reject the free software out of hand at their "first look".
Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this a preview if they don't want people to say what they think?
You really aren't going to help F/OSS by calling people whingers - it's a kind of whinging in itself.
just kill gnome 3, please (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What GNOME really needs (Score:3, Insightful)
Well at Least... (Score:2, Insightful)
it looks like GNOME is now copying MacOSX instead of Windows *eye roll*.
At least now their copying something that at least works, but still, they're copying, and thus ensuring that they are always playing catchup, and creating an inferior product. This is not a new problem, and has been talked about repeated on /. 2005 [slashdot.org], 2006 [slashdot.org], and even last June [slashdot.org]. With the notable exception of Firefox, there hasn't been anything original, innovative, and well good from the F/OSS community, which is very disturbing.
Hell, read some CHI, USENIX, and SIGIR papers people! Stop making a poor facsimile of two years, and start making the next five. Ask yourself, why the hell is Wave coming from Google, instead of us?
Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape the geek-in-a-basement marketshare, it has to focus on the average non-tech user. And no, pasting a link to a windows share is not what this user does.
Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file" that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is. He doesn't organize his files, he doesn't care about file hierarchies, he just wants his file. He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour. Believe it or not, no desktop environment makes it really easy to do such basic stuff.
IMHO Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist [gnome.org] is a step in the right direction for the average user.
Re:Well at Least... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
Make a system any idiot can use and only idiots will use it.
Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a major ongoing failure. The problem with relying on people that are motivated by their inspiration is that you tend not to get "normal." You have to pay people to work on "normal". Refining and polishing is not fun. Inventing your own bespoke miracle from whole cloth and taking it no more than 10% of the way to functional before you lose interest and wander off is infinitely more fun.
There are some amazing products among the Gnome and KDE collections. Amarok, kate, konsole, k3b, etc. Individually these are nice programs.
KDE 4 is and ongoing failure. I haven't bothered to get my hands on 4.3 yet because 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 killed all hope. They haven't had the 5 years it's going to take to fix what's wrong with 4.x. I'm sticking with 3.5.x until that interval has passed.
Gnome is still plagued by Nautilus [1]. Dolphin appears to have a point, although pursuing it at the expense of a real file manager is another fail. The vast collection of background services sucking down hundreds of MB of RAM doing who the hell knows what is also on-going and ever worsening problem.
Both systems pollute home directories with vast file hierarchies hidden in dot-file directories making a shared NFS home a practical impossibility. You'd think they were being paid by the dot-file. No one in either group seems to realize why this isn't desirable. It doesn't even occur to them that it might not be!
[1] Just boot XP and clone Windows Explorer, mkay...? A badly done clone of Explorer would trump anything Gnome/KDE has produced to date wrt file management. And remember kids, detail/list view is, if not pretty, absolutely fucking critical; alphabets replaced pictographs for a reason.
Re:Feel Like I've Been Punched In The Stomach (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. Gnome 3 is a mental disorder. It's what happens when you spend all your time dreaming about how to come up with a new UI paradigm when there is already a highly satisfactory, perfectly usable, and well accepted paradigm that has stood the test of time, and that no one is complaining about. It is new for the sake of new. Kde 4 was much the same thing, but at least they optimized their infrastructure and cleaned up some rough edges in the process (while hopelessly screwing up some basic stuff).
Despair not, however. There is still Xfce, and it shows no sign of succumbing to a mental disorder.
Re:Who needs GNOME when Windows is affordable (Score:4, Insightful)
You are aware that OS X natively supports NFS and MacFUSE works exactly like Linux FUSE?
Leave well alone! (Score:5, Insightful)
nobody cares.
Nobody except the millions of people like me who use Gnome. The current version is near-perfect and the new one seems to have lost all the good points and added nothing. OK, all the desktops on screen at once could be useful once in a while, but WTF! If it ain't broke (and it ain't), don't "fix" it.
Re:WTH (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, for Pete's sake. That's unbelievably lame. If you lose single-click-to-open capability, then it's a huge step backward and a crock. Double click is an abomination. It BARELY had some feeble justification when there was only a single mouse button, but it's a complete crock in the real world of 2 or more buttons.
If it takes even longer to open a folder than current Gnome, that's just unacceptable. Compare navigating folders containing thousands of files using the Gnome file-open dialog now, against the Kde file-open dialog. It's night and day. The Kde version is faster when you first hit such a folder, and then it caches the contents and is blazing fast after that. Night and day.
Time to branch at 2.28 and maintain a sane alternative.
Re:WTH (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE feels largely like a shadow of its former self at this point.
Back in the 3.x series, KDE was my favorite desktop environment. It was fast, intuitive, and entirely configurable. I preferred it gnome at that point. It just seemed better developed.
Then 4.0 was released. What a disaster. It had fewer features than the 3.x series, and was filled with significantly more bugs. Even things like the desktop were broken - all for the sake of a few cool-looking but generally not that important desktop widgets. The file manager was replaced with dolphin, which was also inferior to its predecessor. Some simple things like right clicking on a file now behave completely differently depending on whether you are using the file manager or the destop (like unzipping files).
Apparently, the 4.0 release wasn't intended for users who wanted a stable, full-featured desktop. This is fine, but then don't call it 4.0, give it a name like 4.0alpha, and don't go marketing it around like it is ready for use. The distributions all shipped it when they shouldn't have. Even in 4.3, kde is still playing catch up to the 3.x - it just doesn't seem like it's worth waiting anymore.
On top of all this, some of the key desktop apps, like the music player amarok, decided to 'follow in its footsteps' and do major rewrites as well. Do a search on google for 'amarok 2.0' and you can see how that turned out.
I sincerely hope that gnome doesn't make the same mistakes. I know as a developer its always tempting to redo major components so that you get the 'wow' factor, but I think that is probably frequently done to the detriment of the users.
Re:Glad it's delayed. It's rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please fix the window manager (Score:1, Insightful)
They will fix this issue, by removing workspaces, which will be deemed far too confusing for most people, especially since the developer's grandmother doesn't use them or know what they are.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop fucking with the interface (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine you were looking to buy a new car. Going to a dealership, you are presented with a sedan that is marketed as "redefining the way drivers interact with their automobile." Getting behind the wheel, you discover that standard conventions like the steering wheel, turn indicator, gear shift, accelerator and brake pedals have all been replaced with New and Improved devices that the salesman assures you are so much Better.
Would you buy the damned thing?
I'm sick and tired of coders who pretend they are cognitive psychologists or ergonomics experts.
Just implement a standard GUI using normal conventions. Anything more and people like me will either find ways to turn the bullshit off, or we'll avoid using your product.
Microsoft is about to learn this the hard way with their new bullshit replacement for the task bar.
Commendable, but (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of designing a new approach to the desktop is commendable and shows one of the advantages of open source. If people doesn't like it they can switch to other alternatives. The idea of making it work well is also a positive innovation on some well established practices of both the FOSS and proprietary camps.
However there are for sure some strange things in this Gnome Shell.
On the positive side, the large Activities menu could be very useful on the forthcoming generation of touchscreen computers because it provides a larger target for fingers than the menu items we have now. It reminds me a lot of the interfaces used by some Linux distributions for netbooks it is seems good. Maybe it's not so handy for computers that only have a mouse (too much travel).
Finally I hope that the top bar can be moved to the bottom because I just hate top bars. They are placed right where my eyes look by default but they are the less important piece of information on the screen. Apple made it totally wrong IMHO and MS improved their design, maybe the only time they did it.
So, I'll be using Gnome Shell in its present form? Maybe I'll give a try but I bet I'll soon switch to something else, back to Gnome 2 if I can. Other desktops I so for Linux look to much like Windows, something that cannot be good considering all the years I had to use it and never liked the way it worked.
Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck (Score:5, Insightful)
The formula for a popular successful desktop is so simple: something fully integrated with all options available via menus (program launching, suspend/hibernate, screensaver, etc), and something fast and stable. Very few everyday users care about some translucent twitter widget on the desktop. They want a platform to launch applications from that is simple, fast and stable. That should be priority number one.
Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score:3, Insightful)
so windows 7 FINALLY implemented alt+f2 launcher from kde and gnome, but the huge improvement was that they made it appear instead of the start menu ? :)
i've been using launcher for years now, and i completely agree that it is very convenient. but somehow i see this as windows following what was available on linux long time ago, except that they have brought commandline in front of the user as opposed to gui. very simple commandline, but still we get people complaining that "if you have to enter text into some box, it's not usable" - and they are talking about linux distros, of course,
Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score:1, Insightful)
I guess the people who wrote Gnote [gnome.org] cared that Tomboy runs on mono.
Re:WTH (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WTH (Score:2, Insightful)
But it has to be said problems only arose when the likes of Kubuntu used it for their 6 monthly distribution, this wasn't KDE's fault.
The present KDE4.3.2 is quite a nice desktop, most if not all features from KDE3.5 have now been included, the speed is almost back and for future development we have the advantage of the new QT libraries.
I'm now running KDE4.3.3 and although there are a few issues it's very workable and likeable.
Because of it's lack of integration early on and more recently the lack of reconfigurability I've never liked Gnome but it was reasonably stable in code base and experience, these guys should prevent running into the same trap the KDE4 developers did by releasing too early.
Re:Stop fucking with the interface (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sick and tired of coders who pretend they are cognitive psychologists or ergonomics experts.
And I'm sick and tired of idiots that tell coders to do something so-and-so because they know oh-so-much-better.
I'm not even a GNOME user, but even KDE got this crap, with morons telling how stupid and idiotic every developer is. Guess what: there are real usability experts in both projects. Not many however, so if you want they will be happy to get some help in testing. Use their bugzilla or mailing list, get in touch with them and do something.
You will also have to explain what is a standard GUI with normal conventions, since everyone bitches about different things and no one agrees on what they do like.
Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck (Score:3, Insightful)
And let us use the contextual menu (right click) in list view even if it's loaded with items! I hate going back to icons view just to be able to right click to create a folder!!
Re:Leave well alone! (Score:4, Insightful)
millions? really?
do you have a source?
It's Linux, Of course we do..
Getting more serious.. Why do you even question that there are millions of users. Ubuntu alone has stated counting 7-8 million regular users of the repositories, and it's default desktop is Gnome. And as Gnome is one of the big two, if not the most common desktop supplied with a distro, tens of millions is not difficult to justify as a probable user count. And even if you take the most pessimistic figures guessed at by the various web trackers, desktop Linux's 1% is 1% of a billion computer users. Do the math.
Re:Feel Like I've Been Punched In The Stomach (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WTH (Score:3, Insightful)
"...people are saying "I hate where GNOME is going with GNOME 3, I'm switching to KDE!"."
I've actually dumped them both and gone back to twm.
Re:Stop fucking with the interface (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, but this supposedly "fucking with the interface" doesn't actually happen. In KDE4, you still close windows by single-clicking the small [x] up in the right corner of the window, you still open apps by clicking icons in a menu, you can still put files on your desktop. Yet, you have masses of assclown know-it-alls like the GP who will complain that everything is ruined, because, oh -- they never really say, they just whine, whine, whine.
Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Umn, SUPER+R has been in windows since Win9x iirc. The search box in the start menu is much more functional, as it also searches recent documents, and installed applications. It can be configured for more as well. IMHO Win7 finally does a doc/taskbar right. Though it is a pretty big rip off of OSX and for those that remember, OS/2. The GUI desktop is an evolutionary approach, though ideas can be burrowed from other sources. I think the new Gnome screenshots look a lot like KDE taken to the next level myself.
Honestly, I really like Win7's desktop/gui. It's the first time I've used windows and really feel like I'm not missing "Feature X" from either OSX, Gnome or KDE. The past few releases of KDE are far too out there for me, to be honest. I like the current Gnome, but usually replaced the menu bar, and put it all into a single strip, as most of my use has been on a laptop with limited screen space.
Re:GNOME Shell == Clusterfuck (Score:3, Insightful)
So true... both desktop environments are missing the point. You have misguided ego-hounds like Aaron Seigo chasing after some elusive new "desktop paradigm" which no one has asked for nor wants.
Except that people have asked for and do want it. Do you really think Plasma appeared out of thin air (or fully-formed from Aaron's over-active imagination)? The answer is no. When Aaron took over maintainership of KDE 3's kicker application one of the most popular third-party KDE programs was one called SuperKaramba, which added widgets to your desktop, similar to other third-party programs for Mac and Windows.
What Aaron "innovated" was that there's no reason that you don't have to have two processes to manage one desktop (or three processes to manage one workspace). Plasma was an attempt to codify existing practice with a saner underlying design. Of course the desktop replacement wasn't as fully featured in KDE 4.0 as kdesktop was in KDE 3.5 but the reasons for not holding off forever on 4.0 have been discussed ad nauseum.
The formula for a popular successful desktop is so simple: something fully integrated with all options available via menus (program launching, suspend/hibernate, screensaver, etc), and something fast and stable. Very few everyday users care about some translucent twitter widget on the desktop. They want a platform to launch applications from that is simple, fast and stable. That should be priority number one.
We have a fully integrated menu-enabled desktop, and KDE 4 is fast and stable for me (with the exception of a glibc 2.10.1 issue :( )
You conflate the issues of stability/speed with "translucent widgets". These issues are not mutually exclusive. kicker in KDE 3.5 was translucent (via evil hacks, but still). SuperKaramba widgets were translucent via the same hack. And yet whenever people talk about KDE 4 disparagingly they usually bring up 3.5 as some paragon of perfection. I mean, yeah 3.5 is better than Windows, but there was still plenty of room for improvement.
Does not fix the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience with *inexperienced* users always shows one thing that no Desktop GUI seems to have addressed/solved yet: the User who does not care whether the program they want is already running or not, they just want to use it. At the moment you look to see in one area if, say, you have a web browser already running and if not then you start one. This is one step too many. The User should just have one button to press per app and then the GUI decides whether to simple bring an existing app window to the front, or start the app for the first time. (Some programs play well with multiple startups, others do not.)
Re:KDE 4! (Score:2, Insightful)
I find I get closest to what I had on real kde running xfce with the kde backend and the kde applications. I use the new QGtkStyle which makes the kde /qt applications use gtk to draw the widgets. and compiz expose and cairo-dock (I don't like the always on top of the xfce panel). This gives me most of what I had with kde 3.5 and compiz except different wallpaper per desktop.
I just got done trying kde 4.3 for 3 weeks. It is to much of pain to get it to give me MY desktop not what they fucking want to give me.
Most of the applications are as good as the old ones (the only complaints I see are 2 i don't use konq. and amorock).
Since the kde devs. now talk about options being bad! sort of like gnome did from 1.4 ->2 i don't see kde ever going back to a useful desktop os again. I think they are going for the new name of KCE K Cellphone Environment.
Oh I was the same as you in I used gnome 1.4 and tried gnome 2 could not get used to how unfriendly it was to configuring what you want and moved to kde.
Re:Who needs GNOME when Windows is affordable (Score:3, Insightful)
Might want to use a different calculator, though. By my count, you have accounted for 105% of your computing time...
Stability (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope they use the extra time to make things stable, organized, configurable and documented. More descriptive tooltips would help, too.
I recently installed Fedora 11 and in only 3 weeks I've lost the abilty to see the top of the cube, to focus on no windows, to zoom using the scroll wheel, and to bring up a menu by clicking over the desktop. Compiz configuration is hopelessly disorganized. Advice from user forums points to menu entries that don't exist and suggest changes that have no effect.
On the plus side, gnome has the first edge flip I've ever used that is good enough that I don't turn it off after a few days. Now if they'd only make an option to require an ALT key or button press for edge flip and I'd be a lot happier.
Also, it crashes occasionally, but I don't know for sure that the fault is with gnome and not firefox or something else.