Gnome 2.30 Released 138
Hypoon writes "The GNOME project is proud to release this new version of the GNOME desktop environment and developer platform. Among the hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements, GNOME 2.30 has several highly visible changes: new features for advanced file management, better remote desktop experience, easier notes synchronization and a generally smoother user experience. Learn more about GNOME 2.30 through the detailed release notes and the press release."
April Fools! (Score:5, Funny)
April Fools!
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Re:April Fools! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, great joke - Gnome, ADDING features? Give me a break!
Re:April Fools! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm guessing that no jokes today IS the joke.
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Mod parent up funny, really. Someone is really taking those moderator points a little too seriously...
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Conies are Rabbits, and six of them should properly be counted as three braces of conies and then eaten by Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.
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Thank you. Everything they go on and on about is stuff I rip out or chmod -x the executable or copy a bash script over the executable to get what I want.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Og Maciel"? No way is that a real name. Definitely an AF.
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Headscratch. (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, what the hell, Slashdot! Serious news? On this, the holiest day of the Geek Calendar?
Seeing "support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features" in the same sentence was a pretty good start, but things just trailed off from there. I demand a punchline from this press release, or at least some enlightened puns about how to reduce the window manager's footprint!
Re:Headscratch. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, what the hell, Slashdot! Serious news? On this, the holiest day of the Geek Calendar?
Gah. I think the best thing Slashdot could do this April 1st is to just do nothing at all. In addition to being a joke in itself, they would also be recognizing that they simply can never surpass OMG PONIES. Never.
Using the Internet in general is just painful on the 1st. Everybody thinks they need to do a joke, whether they have a good idea or not, and most of the time it's just an old obvious "joke" that isn't funny anymore. People of the Internet: If you have a good idea, go for it. If not, don't bother.
That said, XKCD [xkcd.com] has a pretty good one this year. Hint: Try "make me a sandwich" :)
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sudo make me a sandwich
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Damn, rm -rf * doesn't do anything.
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Doh! You forgot sudo!
XKCD spoilers (Score:2)
If you want to spoil the fun, all the commands are spelled out clearly in the source code (the link to which I'm sure you can find).
Try "hello joshua" :)
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Is it wrong that I prefer this style to XKCD's normal page?
Or that it makes me want to go home to use my Linux box?
SPOILER ALERT (Score:2, Informative)
apt-get
This APT has Super Cow Powers.
apt-get moo
(picture of cow)
...."Have you mooed today?"...
emacs
You should really use Vim.
vi
You should really use Emacs.
hello
Why hello there!
exit
Bye(CLI terminates)
I was disappointed at the lack of a python shell and "import antigravity". I just really felt like flying today.
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Redflex is the Australian company that is running and promoting these idiotic "traffic cameras" that are supposed to save us from bad drivers, Al Quaieda, halitosis and all forms of evil.
Especially when you look at the full "fess up" video: April FOOLS!
HMMM - is there an Aussie word for FOOL and FRAUD?
OH YES its : "Redflex"!
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or at least some enlightened puns about how to reduce the window manager's footprint!
Here you go. [fluxbox.org]
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I demand a punchline from this press release, or at least some enlightened puns about how to reduce the window manager's footprint!
Enlightenment isn't the default WM in Gnome anymore :-)
Oh, you talking about the footprint logo thingey there.
OnceBittenTwiceShy (Score:1, Funny)
Hah! Bring it on. You won't get me this year!
Don't fall for it. (Score:2, Funny)
Just say "GNO".
need some better visuals (Score:3, Insightful)
I love Gnome, but is looks so outdated these days...
Re:need some better visuals (Score:5, Funny)
I love Gnome, but is looks so outdated these days...
All the cool UIs have buttons on the left. Someone should do that for Gnome.
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All the cool boys smoke, wear shoes on their hands and a onion on their belt! We must do that too!
Oh, and tomorrow they plan to jump off a bridge! We should totally do that to!
Just so we will finally be accepted by $retardedJoeRandomLUser!
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If modern = hideous shine effects (ala Windows....and Mac...and KDE) then give me Gnome any day. I want something I can manage to look at all day if I have to, not something that burns my eyes after half an hour. As for themes, I like Sonar these days - nice, well executed and not too bland.
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wait what? the mac does not have hideous shine effects. I just took a pic of some of the native apps (itunes, safari and the system preferences) and I see no shine effects. I guess the window buttons, but they are so small, that does it really count as being overly shiny?
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/7720/screenshot20100401at440.png [imageshack.us]
Said that, I do prefer gnome over kde.
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The dock, and the scroll bars, and the buttons (although that was in 10.3 that I last saw the buttons), and the pretty much every single icon for the huge majority of apps. The main title bar and other widgets are a bit better than the Vista/7 shine, though.
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Gnome "rebooted" like the Star Trek franchise. Apparently they hired Abrams, because what you see is lens flare.
Windows Evince Printing Support? (Score:1, Troll)
Evince on Microsoft Windows(R) now includes support for printing, PostScript and comics.
Now I know it's April 1st.
Can we please just shoot this turkey (Score:1, Funny)
I don't put a lot of faith in DE developers that can't fix a simple "Show/Hide hidden and backup files" problem in their file-browser. It's only been how many years?
Seriously, I set it to show hidden/backup files and tar up a directory (after checking the files) and SENT MY BOSS BACKUP AND HIDDEN FILES THAT I DID NOT WANT TO. That could have been the end of my little world!
Gnome - what a cluster-f*ck, heheheh!
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Seems to be a lot of Linux/Gnome/KDE bashing on slashdot these days. Makes me think that the Microsoft Trolls have come out to play.
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***Seems to be a lot of Linux/Gnome/KDE bashing on slashdot these days. Makes me think that the Microsoft Trolls have come out to play.***
Could just be folks admitting that Unix has a lot of problems also. OTOH, if I use Unix (which I do), I get mediocre software for a bit less than it's worth instead of paying too much, I don't have to worry about licensing, and I don't have to deal with the $#@(&% registry.
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No, it's people who use the command line. After all, you don't see a lot of bash bashing.
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I don't put a lot of faith in DE developers that can't fix a simple "Show/Hide hidden and backup files" problem in their file-browser. It's only been how many years?
Seriously, I set it to show hidden/backup files and tar up a directory (after checking the files) and SENT MY BOSS BACKUP AND HIDDEN FILES THAT I DID NOT WANT TO. That could have been the end of my little world!
Gnome - what a cluster-f*ck, heheheh!
Note to self: don't store "WhyIHateMyBoss.txt" on company equipment.
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That's your fault for thinking that a visual setting has anything to do with a filesystem operation, and for not checking what you send. A couple of years ago I got caught out the other way - File Roller was ignoring . folders, which was a PITA because I kinda needed them.
You know what they say... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You know what they say... (Score:5, Funny)
" If you can't fix it - give it more features! "
Did God say that after giving women boobs?
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No, before
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No - boobs came after he decided he couldn't fix...
I love slashdot (Score:1)
The Benefits of Moving Backward (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting to note that, in Nautilus, Browser-mode is now the default over Spatial-mode. Years ago, in the 2.0 days with whatever-that-company-was-that-made-Nautilus and the wonderful new HIG and whatnot, the switch to Spatial was heralded as a major improvement and modernization. Now, like many of those huge and bitterly disputed changes, the grand step forward is being reversed with only a slight mention.
And yet, despite the reversal of so many of those improvements, I do think it's making Gnome better; it's just taking a very long time for the idealists of days past to realize that their ideals didn't really work in the real world.
Re:The Benefits of Moving Backward (Score:4, Interesting)
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The only thing I want is slightly smarter window management. If a non-gnome application opens its icon is highlighted in the task bar as a new window. Clicking on the window minimizes the new window. What I want is a task bar option to never minimize.
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I hate minimized windows (well, I hate overlapping windows in general but haven't found a tiling WM that's 100% what I want either.) If you're using Compiz, in CCSM you can disable minimizing windows. In Window Rules, put "Any" (without quotes) in the Non Minimizable Windows field. This makes the various ALT-Tab window switchers actually useful since they won't show minimized windows (or at least Scale won't.)
You can also set Always On Top rules here which is helpful for those apps that create child windows
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Same here. I had been a happy KDE user, but then they went to KDE 4. It lacked polish and crashed everywhere. This reminded me of my first experiences with KDE, which had finally been cleaned up with the later releases of the KDE 3.5 series. KDE 4 seemed a step backward. This caused me to look at other window managers. I found the tiling window managers. They are so much better to use--it's the first time I feel like an actual window manager (not desktop environment, but window manager) is actually a useful
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Windows has never had a spatial file manager, hasn't it? That's one of the things that pisses me off every time I find myself using Windows.
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Windows 95 had a poor imitation of spatial mode, and OS X copied it, leaving a poor taste in everyone’s mouth. The only good spatial file managers are Mac OS Classic and Nautilus.
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Wrong - there's no such thing as a good spatial file manager, unless you're too retarded to figure out how to use a proper file manager like Windows Explorer.
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Gnome also dropped support for XSMP, breaking compatibility with almost any non Gnome app, to do it more like Windows (and a fatuous MS derived use case about closing laptop lids).
Then there is a centralised config database.
And people use Gnome because KDE is too much like Windows (i.e. the default theme has the panel at the bottom).
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Re:The Benefits of Moving Backward (Score:5, Informative)
"Gnome also dropped support for XSMP, breaking compatibility with almost any non Gnome app, to do it more like Windows (and a fatuous MS derived use case about closing laptop lids)."
No one dropped it, XSMP code was in terrible state and did more harm than good. There are new gnome session in works for GNOME 3.0 to fix this.
"Then there is a centralised config database."
And it is bad why? :) Not mentioning that it is NOT a binary nightmare which are loaded at startup and leaks memory like hell. It is pure text xml files, with very good descriptions what each feature means. Heck, you can grep them and support user with changing settings from command line! Still, even then apps aren't forced to use gconf/dconf, it is only when you want to be a part of official release.
"And people use Gnome because KDE is too much like Windows (i.e. the default theme has the panel at the bottom)."
How this remotely connects with what you said above? People use GNOME for very different reasons, and I think default position of panels are least thing which makes people to choose one or another.
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Not just that, but openSUSE just has a bar at the bottom by default and I personally much prefer it. All the professional usefulness and good apps of Gnome with themes you can use all day without getting
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And people use Gnome because KDE is too much like Windows (i.e. the default theme has the panel at the bottom).
I removed the top bar of my gnome desktop because it's on the way of my apps there and moved everything into the bottom one. And yes, I don't use KDE because it's too much like Windows but I could switch if gnome 3.0 kills the way I like to use my computer as in the demoes I saw.
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It would be really nice if they could figure out how to hide the task bar so it takes ZERO pixels. In every version for years "hide" has meant a huge 6 pixel grey border, which you can at best reduce to 1 pixel by using gconf. Since KDE has been doing this for years you can't blame some X defect for this.
Also they need to fix damn click to raise. I want to turn it off, but those idiots doing the window manager somehow wrote this option so it ignores the *programs* attempt to raise the windows. This is USELE
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Re:The Benefits of Moving Backward (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to be a spacial junkie... (Score:3, Insightful)
...but I still do not use browser mode, either. Instead, I am now just using the terminal 99% of the time. The spacial implementation in Gnome failed for me because it was way too clunky. For something that is supposed reflect placement of real objects in real life, you really need to be able to interact with them with both hands in order for it to be enjoyable. In other words, there needs to be many more keyboard/mouse/mouse-keyboard commands for mass window management. Sometimes, it just doesn't work
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In KDE?
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In the keyboard shortcuts, bound to ctrl+alt+tab by default. Now let me get out of the way of your rant.
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Where is my system level ctrl-~ to switch between windows of a single application?
Alt-F6
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http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/13/175252 [slashdot.org]
They should have listed to Steve. Spatial interfaces turn the users into janitors. There's just no ideal way to pre-arrange all your folders so that there's no overlap, sure you can do it for a few if you're always working on the same, but eventually you need to use one of the other half million folders on your system and the windows end up blocking. Yaaaay, now time to play the tile game on your screen.
If your window manager doesn't allow spat
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This page says GNOME 2.6.0 started spatial but now we have GNOME 2.3. Going backwards with the version numbers
http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html [bytebot.net]
Also on wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-2.6-en.png [wikipedia.org]
Typing in paths (Score:5, Insightful)
How can we make Gnome better? I know! Let's take away that useful button that lets you type in paths. And then yell at you for being stupid when you don't know that button had a Hotkey (Ctrl+L) that still works, even with the button missing.
Stay classy, Gnome devs.
Re:Typing in paths (Score:4, Funny)
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I have never used that button and it has caused confusion of mine several times. I *always* used Ctrl+L. And giving how popular Firefox (or any mainstream web browser as application) is, I think most of users who care knows that Ctrl+L gives you possibility to change location.
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I always used F6 in Firefox to get the location bar, it's the traditional shortcut key for switching between panes in a multi-pane window. That key goes way back to QBasic, you would hit that key to switch between the Help area and the Code area, and also works in text editors with a splitter, like TextPad or Visual Studio. It just so happens that the Firefox developers decided that F6 would be a nice key to go to the location bar for some reason. Maybe because the URL bar is like a second pane in a wind
It's more like maitanance release...and I like it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm GNOME regular since 2003 and all I can say is these 2.x series has been great ride. Yes, there where stuff which were broken, there where people who said that features are taken away, but still, I'm very productive in this desktop and trust me, I have worked with and supported every mainstream and not-so-mainstream desktop under the sun - it is one of the best. Apple gets it first, but GNOME guys cleverfully tries to integrate that stuff what matters. So kudos for all GNOME developers for these series and while I'm still a little bit cautinous about shell, I think it will turn out good in the end (it was quite usable when I tried it during Jaunty).
Beyond usual "small stuff" which is nice to have (like fully working Evince on Windows, giving you good alternative for Adobe Reader or FoxIt), I really like Vinagre improvements. In quite short time, it has become de facto VNC viewer for GNOME platform, and finally there are color bit settings for those with dialups or other slow links.
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I miss one thing in Vinagre that is there in the regular terminal, that is copy/paste from local or even virtual machine to the shell on the remote machine, yes I mainly work with ssh instead of vnc.
I do like the bookmarks for remote sessions, saves a lot of time and typing the ssh command.
Yay! (Score:2)
"advanced file management, better remote desktop experience, easier notes synchronization and a generally smoother user experience"
I requested those *specifically*!
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"advanced file management, better remote desktop experience, easier notes synchronization and a generally smoother user experience" I requested those *specifically*!
So Gnome2.30 was your idea..
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The features I'm still waiting for... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) A sync framework built-in, for syncing different mobile devices. Everyone has one or more mobile devices now, nothing works really well. My Windows Mobile phone, PDA, my iTouch, etc, are not working well. SynCE and Multi-sync are not up to task (yet). This might be a Linux issue, but it would great too if Gnome could provide a nice syncing framework, if no one at a lower level would want to pick it up. Anyway, I really don't care where that issue should be lied in, I just wish my mobile devices work nicely with my linux laptop. It's annoying having to manage my contact, calendar, task list etc in Windows inside a VirtualBox, in order to be able to sync.
2) Evince should take a look at PDF Xchange PDF viewer. I want to be able to add notes, highlight, etc, in my PDF ebooks. Installing PDF Xchange Viewer on Wine is an ugly solution (font and UI are way ugly), and it's too slow.
3) F-Spot is slow...
4) Anjuta, can we do emacs key binding yet? Haven't used it for a while though.
5) Network Connections should apply network settings after changes, not having to ask users to restart networking service or reboot. Ok, probably just an Ubuntu issue.
6) Gnome should wake up probably after a suspend. I have no such issue with other desktop or WM, just Gnome. I tolerated it so far, coz I don't do suspend that much, and prefer to hibernate. But it's still annoying when you need to do it.
7) iBus seems to have a bad habit of hanging from time to time, especially when you are typing too fast, and you have to switch between input methods very often. And start up is slow too.
I'll try the new version soon, hope to see some of my problems solved. Regardless, thanks a lot for the hard work, really appreciat it.
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3) F-Spot is slow...
And what exactly did you expect from a program written in Mono? It has been pushed in due to political considerations, not because it's usable.
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Conduit [gnome.org] is a very promising sync framework. I've used it a year ago, sync over ssh failed, but the project is really nice, allowing to create complex sync rules with an easy to use GUI.
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Worse, if let it, it eats metadata at night; I'm referring to the madness they do with time zone conversion. Even if you convince it to leave your pictures alone it will still fuck with how time is displayed...
Thankfully not only is it not part of Gnome, but a good alternative seems to finally be getting of the ground [yorba.org].
tried it 4 years ago (Score:2, Flamebait)
gnome seems to straddle this useless position of being less polished and feature packed then KDE, but slower and more comlpex then XFCE4.x I love XFCE btw it's a great wimdow manager.
Nautilus bookmarks... (Score:2)
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Why can't somebody fix this?
Did you submit a bug report? Perhaps they don't know about it.
Re:Nautilus bookmarks... (Score:4, Informative)
It depends, it's a dynamic area so additional devices are added and removed a lot, you'd have to have some way of defining where they went too, I don't think a simple drag and drop would work for that. I've never even thought about the ordering before, it seems sensible enough though (however it is slighlty different on the system Places menu and Nautilus sidebar). Home folder, desktop, filesystem, external drives, trash.
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I have a dual boot system with "filesystem" and "windowsboot" partitions on my main drive, plus three internal hard drives that are always connected, named "mediaI", "mediaII", "mediaIII". The order at the moment is:
filesystem
network
mediaIII
windowsboot
mediaII
floppy drive
mediaI
I just can't imagine what ordering scheme would result in that list. Sometimes the three media drives are not "monotonic" - II will be first, then III, then I.
I'd even be happy if it were random, but c
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I'm not a developer, but seriously, how hard can it be to allow the user to drag and drop items in the "Places" widget? The nearly identical bookmarks can be drag-and-dropped.
It's not hard at all to allow drag and drop - what is hard is being able to meaningfully remember and integrate the changes made when some device isn't there. If you drag something to the top-most location, unplug it, drag something else to top, and put the first stick back in, which should be the first? And where should the other one go?
The bookmarks are simple, because they only change when you change them.
Sawmill/Sawfish? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone got sawmill/sawfish running on a recent library set?
If so, got a link?
It had Gnome compatibility, but didn't clutter up the desktop with real estate-stealing nonsense or kick off a bunch of annoying memory- and disk-hogging "features", such as indexing, that I don't want, as do both Gnome and KDE.
Re:Sawmill/Sawfish? (Score:4, Informative)
Saw{mill|fish} is just a window manager. It is not a desktop environment. In gnome terms it compares to metacity, not the whole gnome desktop. If you want to run just a window manager you can do that with any of the available window managers. If you like programming your window manager in Lisp then saw{mill|fish} is a good choice but there are many other extensible window managers out there.
I run a gnome desktop without all those memory-hogging misfeatures like indexing. It has a 17 pixel high gnome panel on the top so the rest of the screen is completely free for useful stuff. Use a theme with small window borders (eg. Mist or Metabox) instead of those huge gaudy monstrosities which many distributions seem to favour. Well-configured gnome is actually one of the least cluttered desktop environments I have found.
Why is F-Spot still there? (Score:4, Interesting)
To justify the presence of the Mono libraries. Why else include this dreadfully slow application when there are much faster, more fully featured, rival applications ready to take its place.
Miguel must have all his fingers and each of his twelve toes crossed right now, because Mono is the only justification for his salary and share options at Novell. Even the men in suits would get a bit suspicious if none of the software the Miguelistas were producing was used by anyone. At least forcing users to use it creates the illusion that it is needed. Without the inclusion of Mono, Miguel and his band of happy followers would be out on their sorry asses (well, maybe not asses, donkeys perhaps, and even then probably just the one between the lot of them).
But really... why is F-Spot still there?
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GNOME is Nice (Score:2)
but the original explorer.exe shell it mimics has fewer bells and whistles, so that's a more user-friendly and better designed UI experience.
GNOME 3.0 might be better, though. I join all GNOME-istas in hoping so! (And hoping for an eventual fix for the Save File dialog -- it's a tough problem.)
Bad marketing (Score:1)
I always wondered why it's called gnome. Why couldn't they give some more sensible name, like Midget Widget Toolkit.
(By the way "gnóm" means clumsy in Hungarian. But I guess it doesn't sound better in English either.)