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GNOME Roadmap Released
Hi everyone, The GNOME Roadmap for 2.20 (and partially for 2.22 and future 2.x releases) is available at: http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap The GNOME Roadmap is a big-picture view of functionality we expect GNOME to include in short-term and long-term future. The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members. We hope this roadmap increases the awereness about the future steps of the project inside and outside the community and helps us to look forward and plan where we want to go. For a quick overview of our roadmap process, please see: http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Process Let's make GNOME rock even more! Thanks, --lucasr -- devel-announce-list mailing list devel-announce-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce-list (Log in to post comments)
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 25, 2007 21:50 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link] Interesting roadmap. A few big things, many small, and some that made mewonder 'why does that even have to be written?'... Why does evince need 'editable toolbar', wouldn't that come as default in each app? and several apps seem to need to implement printing multiple pages - does each gnome dev need to waste his time on such basic infrastructure stuff? That won't lead to consistency, I guess.
Anyway, let's hope they can finish all this stuff and catch up with the
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 14:54 UTC (Sat) by ipes (guest, #43384) [Link] I would also love to see more quality competition in the desktop area, butfrom the roadmap it just doesn't look like it's going to happen. The basic infrastructure improvement to support the things you mention would require a major overhaul of the undelying libraries and the API, but they explicitly state that they won't do it. They are afraid to make another "break" as they call it, as so their decision is to not have a Gnome 3.0 in the foreseable future.
But somehow the competition has managed to make yet another leap forward,
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 15:55 UTC (Sat) by thebluesgnr (guest, #37963) [Link] I see the KDE trolls have arrived...
Anyway, keeping 2.x as the version doesn't mean GNOME can't introduce new technologies. It has successfully managed to adopt HAL, cairo, d-bus, a new printing API and others. Also, if you have actually read the roadmap you've seen another example: gvfs will be introduced to replace gnome-vfs.
The GNOME developers are not "afraid" to break every single GNOME app out there, they just decided they won't do that until they actually have to. As a user I appreciate that.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 17:24 UTC (Sat) by ipes (guest, #43384) [Link] I follow both projects with sympathy, since they both are free softwaredesktops, and friendly competition between them has been the driving force of Linux desktop for many years. But I must admit I am really disappointed by the approach taken by Gnome of giving up innovation for what they call "stability" but really is stagnation. The pace of development has slowed down significantly compared to what it once was.
One of the few changes that is being introduced, gnome-vfs, is in my
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 7:08 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well I noticed that with GVFS or whatever is 'next' for Gnome will have Fuse hooks to mount the shares at ~/.vfs or some such thing. Don't quote me on it, I saw it in somebody's blog a while ago.
What would be nice is some GUI for desktop FUSE usage. Or maybe a user-specific ~/.config/fstab file or something like that.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 10:49 UTC (Sun) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] There's not much info about GVFS online, as I expect the hackers are busy writing it rather than documenting it, and it's not finished yet, etc. etc. But check out http://hpj.blognaco.com/2007/05/17/gvfs-progress/ which has some tantalising information about a FUSE frontned that will appear at ~/.vfs/.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted Jun 2, 2007 16:36 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link] well, there is KIO-Fuse, which can mount any KIO-slaves via Fuse as adirectory for use for non-KDE apps. I agree more work here would be great...
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 14:06 UTC (Sun) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] What technologies you mean? When you look at KDE & GNOME developments there are lot of parallels. KDE Decibel? Look at Telepathy. Solid? Check HAL. Phonon? What about GStreamer proper? And PulseAudio?
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 21:24 UTC (Sun) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] some more information ...
> KDE Decibel? Look at Telepathy.
these projects are actually extensions of each other.
> Solid? Check HAL.
solid is an API that backends on to HAL where it exists, but can use other
this means we'll be seeing hardware awareness in a lot more applications a
> Phonon? What about GStreamer proper?
this has been explained many times. portability, simplicity, API
this means we'll be seeing multimedia awareness in a lot more applications
hm.. wasn't this an article about GNOME? why are we talking about KDE
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 28, 2007 4:33 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] yaya.
The KDE folks are taking things that are being developed with Freedesktop.org folks, which are being implimented into Gnome more directly, and adding additional layers of abstraction for application developers to make their lives easier.
And as far as 'portability' goes.. nowadays only two platforms matter; Unix (Linux, Solaris, *BSD, et al) and Windows. The Gnome folks don't care much about porting the entire desktop to Windows, and KDE does. So that's one of the major reasons for the difference.
If you want to point out KDE being very creative and intellegent, then one of the more interesting things I saw was from 'Zrusin' a QT mother-fing ninja guy.
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/05/mesa-and-llvm.html
It's porting Mesa's shading compiler technology over to LLVM.
This is very freaking fantastic. Anybody remotely interested in blazing fast graphics and fantastic eye candy in tool kits and 3d desktops should sit up and take immediate notice for stuff like this.
This has a potential to outstrip anything anybody has done so far with GPU technology, potentially better then anything coming out of Nvidia.
It's fantastic.
If we are lucky... This, combined with improvements in video drivers for Linux and other such things, has a chance to put Linux and OSS out in front of any other platform in terms of state of the art graphics proccessing and performace. Exactly were Linux and FOSS belongs.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 23:17 UTC (Sat) by thebluesgnr (guest, #37963) [Link] 'why does that even have to be written?'.That's how software works. Why does evince need 'editable toolbar', wouldn't that come as default in each app? I also wonder why it needs editable toolbars, since the default is so nicely designed. But anyway, Gtk+ doesn't support editable toolbars yet; the code exists in libegg, and developers can simply copy and paste it to their application. This isn't exactly nice, but it's a good way to have the code mature until it's ready to be part of a stable library like GTK+. Speaking of evince, it's nice to know KDE 4 will have a similar application. Hopefully it will share resources with evince by using libpoppler, which AFAIK KDE doesn't do yet. and several apps seem to need to implement printing multiple pages - does each gnome dev need to waste his time on such basic infrastructure stuff? Not really. You see, GTK+ has a new printing API (which, by the way, was developed without GNOME having to launch a new major version) and it works great, but not all features are implemented yet. The "several apps" you mentioned are actually two - Evince and Eog - and they're waiting on proper GTK+ support to land that feature. That won't lead to consistency, I guess. Consistency is one of GNOME's strongest features. Anyway, let's hope they can finish all this stuff and catch up with the competition. It's already superior to Vista's interface in my opinion, and it even beats Mac OS X in several points.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 3:19 UTC (Sun) by ipes (guest, #43384) [Link] Somehow I really doubt it's possible to beat anyone with just wishfulthinking. Some actual effort is required. Linux is teeming with dynamic projects that advance very rapidly, starting of course with the Linux kernel itself. Sadly, Gnome is not one of them.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 11:49 UTC (Sun) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] "Speaking of evince, it's nice to know KDE 4 will have a similarapplication. Hopefully it will share resources with evince by using libpoppler, which AFAIK KDE doesn't do yet."
KDE developers are developing on libpoppler -- and libpoppler is used all
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 28, 2007 14:50 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I don't believe that you can talk about consistency and copy-and-pastecoding in the same post!
The thing to do is obviously to put the damn thing in an .a until it
Copying-and-pasting code from project to project is just insanity.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 7:40 UTC (Sat) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link] "The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members."
I can't help but noticing that user feedback is conspicuously absent from the equation. For a user-centered project, as Gnome tries to be, this is ... surprising.
The roadmap is, again, about incremental changes until there will be a big leap forward (hopefully) with Gnome 3.0. Since there's no common vision for Gnome 3.0, this looks like the only viable plan, though it will sure draw more criticism from some users.
While still within the incremental scheme, I hope they will also fix some weakness in Gnome 2.x. I still feel limited when it comes to file management, for instance: it's ironic that I feel more at ease under Windows when it comes to handling files because of features that Gnome lacks ("long click" to rename files, selection of files in list mode, good dual pane file-managers, etc.). And the application suite still looks incomplete: after all these years, where's a Gnome-based burning app like K3b? Why Gnome office is still in its unfinished state? Would be nice to have a KOffice-like suite as an alternative to OO.org ...
Ah ok, end of rant :)
Rehdon
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 9:07 UTC (Sat) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link] A few random comments...
There are no real plans for a Gnome 3.0 release right now (see the notice at http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero). There are more file managers floating around Sourceforge and the like than you can shake a stick at, so if Nautilus doesn't suit you, I'm sure you'll have no difficulty finding something more to your liking. There are a ton of GTK frontends to cdrecord, and notably Nautilus already has built in support for burning CDs (but AFAIK only data CDs, not CD images). The reason that there isn't a Gnome office suite is that there isn't a Gnome office project. Abiword and Gnumeric can be built using the Gnome libraries, but they are purposely separate projects, and in fact both of these applications rely only on GTK and do not depend on the Gnome libraries at all.
In general, Gnome is pretty conservative about adding new programs as "blessed" Gnome applications -- much more so than, say, KDE. This is why KDE has an official project for a full featured CD burning application (K3B) and office suite, while there are no official equivalents from Gnome. I'm not entirely sure what the reason for this is -- I think it's a fear of the project spreading itself too thin -- but I'm not entirely convinced it's a bad thing.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 10:44 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] If you right-click on a CD-image within Nautilus there is a "Burn CD" entry which does what it should.
Have you used k3b? Posted May 31, 2007 4:55 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I'm a Gnome user for the most part, but "burn CD" is hardly a k3b substitute, if you're trying to produce an audio CD.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 13:59 UTC (Sat) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link] "There are more file managers floating around Sourceforge and the like than you can shake a stick at, so if Nautilus doesn't suit you, I'm sure you'll have no difficulty finding something more to your liking."
Believe me, I tried them all: it's not a matter of "liking", but of functionalities, I still have to find a dual-pane filemanager like the good, old Directory Opus on Amiga. You have those under Windows (xplorer2 and a whole bunch of *commander), you have those under KDE (Krusader) and then for GTK you have Gentoo (still requiring the old libraries) and emelfm2, both limited wrt functionalities (can't open a Samba share with them, for instance).
"There are a ton of GTK frontends to cdrecord, and notably Nautilus already has built in support for burning CDs (but AFAIK only data CDs, not CD "images)."
Guess what, tried them all too: not comparable to Nero or even K3b (although Brasero is getting closer, a pity development seems to have slown down). Again, the devil lies in the details, namely the things you can accomplish with the software you're using. If you just need to dump data to a CD/DVD Nautilus works great, if you want to have more control and/or do different things (burning mp3s, for instance), it's not so great.
"The reason that there isn't a Gnome office suite is that there isn't a Gnome office project."
Is that a good reason? There was a plan to come up with a Gnome office suite, what happened to it?
"Abiword and Gnumeric can be built using the Gnome libraries, but they are purposely separate projects, and in fact both of these applications rely only on GTK and do not depend on the Gnome libraries at all."
You could look at it as a strong point, but it doesn't look so to me, on the contrary I find more compelling the KOffice approach, where applications are closely tied one to another.
"I'm not entirely sure what the reason for this is -- I think it's a fear of the project spreading itself too thin -- but I'm not entirely convinced it's a bad thing."
I used to be a great Gnome 2.x fan (and evangelist, I might add) but as time passes I'm growing more and more perplexed. Consider this: you're mentioning the project "spreading itself too thin", but what about the user side spreading too thick? meaning, if you want to choose the "right" tool for a specific task with Gnome you have to install python, mono and a gazillion other things, isn't that a burden too?
Rehdon
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 26, 2007 19:50 UTC (Sat) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link] With respect to file managers I somewhat sympathize with you. But file managers are one of those things that people tend to be very picky over, and this makes it particularly hard to satisfy everyone. I happen to like Nautilus, but maybe I'm just crazy.
I've never really had any problems with the CD burning/mastering in Gnome. I used to use Gnomebaker when that was a new project, and liked it a lot; recently I've heard a lot of good things about Brasero. I'm curious -- what in particular did you find lacking in this area? I haven't used any of these tools in a while (I tend to just burn images), but I recall that when I did I didn't have any difficulty creating audio CDs and the like.
The deal with Abiword and Gnumeric is that they are intended to be lightweight and not have a lot of dependencies. That is what has allowed OLPC, for example, to use these pieces of software. They basically require GTK and nothing more; if you needed to pull in as many Gnome libraries as a typical Gnome application requires, it would not have been feasible to include this software on the XO laptop. Likewise, a lot of other desktop projects (e.g. XFCE) are very thankful for these office tools that have a minimal memory footprint and dependencies. And for Gnome users, you can compile these applications using Gnome libraries and take advantages of all that this has to offer (although I'm not sure what an office suite would be taking advantage of here).
I do sort of agree with you that Abiword and Gnumeric, viewed as a full-fledged "office suite", aren't very compelling. In particular, there isn't a Powerpoint alternative, and Abiword and Gnumeric are developed independently and this shows in little ways. But both comply with the Gnome HIG and are excellent applications on their own. But I look at these applications as a fairly good compromise. On the one hand there is OO.o, which is a huge monolithic project. Realistically, it would be inordinately difficult to try to approach the feature set and MS Office compatibility that OO.o has with a new office suite. On the other hand, if you only deal with reasonably simple MS Office documents, and mostly create your own documents, Abiword and Gnumeric are great pieces of software, and certainly a lot better than OO.o I think. Again, the only real problem that I see with them is the lack of a Powerpoint alternative, and if Evince ever gets support for .ppt (it's tentatively on their roadmap), a large part of that gap will have been filled.
Your last point was concerning the mono, python, etc. dependencies that Gnome software has started to become dependent on. I have mixed feelings about this. Of course I'd prefer that the software was written in highly optimized C, with a low memory footprint, few dependencies, etc. But at the same time, if writing software in these languages means that I get more and better software, and that the software has less bugs, I'm OK with it as long as the memory/CPU requirements don't become too egregious. For example, in the past couple of years I have found the worst offenders in the Gnome camp of software to be: Evolution, Evince, and the Mono software. But Evolution and Evince are both written in C, and I think the insane memory requirements of Mono applications are more a failing with Mono itself than with that software. Software that has a light backend (e.g. well written C/C++ libraries) and a heavy frontend (Python, Mono, etc.) can be a good compromise, if done right. I am very happy with the Sonata, the music player that I use, which is very lightweight and written in Python (with some C, and a dependency on mpd). It uses very little memory, and is much more lightweight than Banshee or the like. The core functionality is done in C, and Python is mostly used to add a few extra features and to write the logic for the GUI. So I'm adopting a wait and see approach to the heavy dependencies of some of the newer Gnome applications. Most of these (i.e. all the ones that depend on Mono, and most of the ones that depend on Python) are not "official" Gnome applications yet because a lot of the Gnome developers are skeptical of the idea of including these in the main Gnome distribution, so I'll wait until they are, and evaluate the issue more fully then.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted Jun 5, 2007 2:18 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] But at the same time, if writing software in these languages means that I get more and better software, and that the software has less bugs, I'm OK with it as long as the memory/CPU requirements don't become too egregious. For example, in the past couple of years I have found the worst offenders in the Gnome camp of software to be: Evolution, Evince, and the Mono software.Heh...leave gnome-system-monitor running for a month and see what happens. :-b (In fairness, it's a 3-year-old version, so hopefully the memory leak and general lameness have been addressed by now. I suppose one of these days I'll upgrade and find out...) Greg
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 21:30 UTC (Sun) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] > This is why KDE has an official project for a full featured CD burning> application (K3B)
it makes me shudder when someone says, "and that is why...." when they
when k3b arrived, there were 3 other (at least) cd burning apps written
it turns out that k3b became the most developed, most popular and
it had nothing to do with anyone blessing it.
most of the other comments in this thread commenting on kde are similarly
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 21:31 UTC (Sun) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] one other note on k3b; it's still in extragear. it was never migrated intoone of the base packages and there is no intention of doing so at this point.. just in case that crossed someone's mind =)
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted Jun 2, 2007 16:41 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link] I must say I appreciate your work on cleaning up the 'official' KDE apps.Moving a lot of stuff to extragear is a good thing - more competition and thus more reason to work hard (or to abandon apps) for the developers. (Noatun, kview... - they would've been OR gone OR better if they would've been in extra-gear, I believe)
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 6:52 UTC (Sun) by dulles (guest, #45450) [Link] LINUX USERS REPEAT AFTER ME: COMPETITION IS GOOD.
I just upgraded from Redhat EL4 to EL5, and discovered KDE 3.5 is a major improvement over KDE 3.3.
They fixed the bugs, cleaned it up, and it even runs faster. KDE 3.5 actually impressed me (I'm a software engineer).
Gnome, on the other hand, hasn't changed at all. The totally retarded Nautilus is still retarded, and a broken mess.
I've been using Linux for ten years, and used to be a Gnome user. Two years ago Nautilus deleted my research, and I switched to KDE.
I haven't gone into the KDE or Gnome code, and I am stating my opinion only as an end user of both desktops.
LINUX USERS REPEAT AFTER ME: COMPETITION IS GOOD.
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted May 27, 2007 10:38 UTC (Sun) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] Good that there is a DE that works for you. I still wonder why people always want to state their experiences on why they chose one or another DE. Ok, it's nice to talk about oneself, I've done it too, but surely most people reading LWN already know what desktop environments they like. Maybe even that they just use one and are not interested in other aspects of it than launching applications.
And this message falls into the also-usual category of "let's all just be friends and rejoice together". I hate _any_ discussion about desktop environments, I think, and still here I am :)
GNOME Roadmap Released Posted Jun 2, 2007 16:45 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link] Well, I have no problem with discussions about what is good or bad aboutdesktops, as long as ppl try to use facts and not 'I don't like it'. I like it, even if ppl tell my I'm talking crap - at least, as long as they explain what's wrong with what I think. I learn, and I like that ;-)
The good thing about LWN is that many ppl know what they're talking about
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