Stormy Peters: What should the GNOME Foundation accomplish in 2010?

Stormy Peters: What should the GNOME Foundation accomplish in 2010?

Yeah. Native MAPI support is something that is needed. It's close, but it's still really buggy. Proper integration into a Windows AD with all the frills is a requirement for Gnome if they want businesses to take them seriously. Since Windows is dominate then, unfortunately, the burden is on the Linux desktop to work well in existing environments.

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Refinement of the Gnome-shell concept and the grouping of application windows. Fixing the alt-tab behavior of Gnome-shell to make it more usable. That sort of thing.

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Probably be more aggressive about the copy-n-paste clipboard thing. I know that Gnome itself is pretty good about remembering clipboard contents when you close out applications, but most third party stuff will break it and cause confusion. The most obvious offender is Firefox, of course.

Try this:
1. Open up Gnome-terminal and type something in it. Highlight it and then right click --> select copy.

2. Close out Gnome-terminal

3. Open up Gedit. Paste your clipboard into that. Add some more of it, highlight it and then right click --> copy.

4. Close out Gedit

5. Open up Firefox. Paste your clipboard into the URL or whatever. Add some more to it. High light it and then right click --> copy.

6. Close out Firefox

7. Open up Gedit. Try to paste into Gedit. Dwell on the fail.

Since most distributions ship Firefox as the default browser for Gnome they are shipping a broken clipboard implementation. Sure if you just use 'Gnome' applications then everything is great, but that is almost never the default.

And managing the clipboard in the current manner may be technically correct, but that is about as relevant to the situation as the color of the car that just passed by my window as I was typing this. And, sure, you could fix Firefox and make it use the clipboard the correctly instead of curb stomping it, but there are just going to be dozens and dozens of other applications just as evil.

Currently users, and I was one of them when I moved from Windows over a decade ago, are accustomed to being able to close out windows and be able to paste. This is very very normal and common thing to do, but which Linux fails at.

As Linux users we are mostly all now trained to, almost subconsciously, to do things like "alt-tab then paste" rather then "close out the window then paste". So we generally don't notice the borked copy-n-paste anymore.

But, really, it should be fixed.

Right now I use Parcellite to work around this problem and it's very cool, but it really is overkill. Gnome needs to integrate a more aggressive approach to clipboard management.