A look at GNOME 2.6 [LWN.net]

March 31, 2004

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

With the GNOME 2.6 release pushed back a week due to GNOME Web Server intrusion, we decided to take an early look at 2.6 with the 2.5.92 test release. For this preview, GNOME 2.5.92 was built using GARNOME on a system running SUSE Linux 9. The GARNOME GNOME distribution is based on the GAR Architecture; it allows a user to build bleeding-edge software without impacting their current system setup, and without having to check releases out of CVS. This is very handy when using a single system for software testing and everyday work that requires a stable desktop.

GARNOME took the better part of an afternoon to build the GNOME 2.5.92 desktop and basic GNOME components on a machine with an Athlon XP 2600+ CPU and 1 GB of RAM. The basic desktop build consumed a little more than 300 MB of space.

The first thing that most users will notice about GNOME 2.6 is that it seems much faster than previous releases, particularly at startup. The Nautilus shell is also much faster than previous releases, but the default behavior has changed for the worse. When navigating through a directory structure using Nautilus, the default is now for Nautilus to open a new window each time the user opens a directory. Needless to say, this behavior rapidly results in a cluttered desktop. It is possible to override this behavior by using the "--browser" option, but it would be preferable for the default behavior to be the least annoying.

Epiphany 1.2 is speedy, and quite streamlined. Perhaps a little too streamlined, in fact. Epiphany's limited feature set may be less confusing for new users who would be overwhelmed by Mozilla's vast array of options. However, users who have become accustomed to Mozilla may find that Epiphany's minimal features are a bit constrictive. The absence of site-specific pop-up blocking could be a problem for some users who have used Mozilla and Firefox's pop-up blocking features. Epiphany also requires that the user close each browser window individually rather than offering the user the ability to exit all browsers. This may save a user from accidentally closing all of their browser windows when they wish to close only one, but it also requires quite a bit of clicking when a user wishes to exit multiple browser windows.

A smaller annoyance is that Epiphany 1.2 does not allow the user to scroll through recently visited sites via the location toolbar. It's unclear what advantage there is to removing such a simple and commonplace feature. The user is able to select from similar URLs after clicking on the location bar and typing a few letters of the URL, but there is no button to allow the user to simply click and highlight a recently visited URL that remains in the location bar history.

A short while ago I tested the Evolution 1.5 release included in the first Fedora Core 2 test release. GNOME 2.6 includes Evolution 1.5.5, which seems far more stable than it was back in February. They are still including a dialog that warns users that 1.5.5 is test software and recommends that the user download 1.4 if they wish to use a stable branch of Evolution. Evolution 1.5 has a few new features, and loses a few as well. The most notable new feature in 1.5 is junk mail filtering. Notably absent is Evolution's "Summary" panel.

GNOME 2.6 also includes the GTK+ 2.4.0 release. This release introduces a new file browser dialog that, in this writer's opinion, is a vast improvement over the "standard" file dialog. When the user navigates into a directory tree, the file browser creates navigation buttons for each directory. For example, if a user navigates into "local/mozilla/chrome" under their home directory, the dialog will create buttons for "local," "mozilla," and "chrome," in addition to the ever-present "Home" button in the dialog. When the user navigates upward in the directory tree, the sub-directories will still be represented as long as they are in the same hierarchy. This allows the user to navigate through the directory structure much more quickly.

Another application included in GARNOME, though not part of the default desktop build, is Totem movie player based on Xine. It's a nice little media player that plays a wide variety of media, including CDs, VCDs and DVDs (providing libdvdcss is installed for encrypted movies), MPEG video, Ogg files and MP3s. Having used Ogle a great deal in the past, this writer is far happier with Totem for DVD playback. It should also be noted that this author spent more than an adequate amount of time testing Gnometris 2.5.9, and can verify that it is fully ready for deployment.

There are, of course, far too many useful applications in the GNOME arsenal to mention here or to test in a reasonable amount of time. It should suffice to say that GNOME/GARNOME 2.5.92 includes a wide array of useful applications for desktop use, including Gnumeric, the Conglomerate XML editor, gLabels (a handy label-making program), Sodipodi, and many others.

For the most part, the 2.5.92 release is ready for widespread use. There were a few glitches here and there, but it's likely they will be ironed out by the final 2.6 release. One also wishes that it were possible to change certain GNOME settings without having to resort to using the GConf editor. One is unpleasantly reminded of the Windows Registry when tinkering with GConf.

Aside from small glitches and minor annoyances, GNOME 2.5.92 was extremely stable and pleasant to use. Pleasant enough, in fact, to cause this writer to seriously consider switching from XFce to GNOME on a permanent basis. Though one may not agree with all of the interface decisions made by GNOME's developers, it is obvious that the GNOME developers have been working hard to make GNOME a useful and user-friendly desktop environment.

(Log in to post comments)

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 1, 2004 3:09 UTC (Thu) by zonker (subscriber, #7867) [Link]

I'll accept grumpy, but old?

Please understand that I *have* given the interface a "good try" and that I haven't written it off -- I simply find that one aspect of GNOME's default behavior to be annoying. Considering there are many, many aspects to GNOME's interface, I don't believe it's unfair to dislike one of them and to say so.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 1, 2004 14:30 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Fair enough, but this choice (new dir/page in new window, new dir/page in same window) has been around for a long time, and there are strong preferences in both directions. Many apps give you a choice, especialy web browsers, mail clients and file managers. It is a choice you really need to make wholesale or not at all, and you need to have a window manager and app-selector that works well with the idea (e.g. an icon bar/taskbar that shows every window, as opposed to every app, doesn't work well with it at all).

My users here all insist on the 'new window' scheme, for example, because they all come from RISC OS, where everything has always worked that way. They find it intensely irritating to have the last directory 'go away' when opening a new one, because they expect to be able to drag and drop between them. Joe likes doing it the way he is used to, which is fine - it's nice that we get a choice. Which the default should be is always going to be contentious, and everyone is free to choose, but I too felt that the article came across as 'I don't like this so it must be wrong', which is not really taking a sufficiently balanced view.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 1, 2004 10:28 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

given that some very smart people have put a lot of effort into this, I plan to give the new interface a good try before writing it off....

They may be smart, but they have been largely beguiled by the philosophy that UIs can be derived from a set of "theorems" on optimal interfaces, rather than considering how each decision will affect users.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 1, 2004 15:26 UTC (Thu) by movement (guest, #871) [Link]

Your implication that they haven't considered the effect on users is patently ridiculous. Everyone who knows a little about UI design is aware that guidelines and research results are an input to the design process, not an output.

The change, I think is a positive one, for a number of reasons. First, remember that the previous in-place method had problems: it was non-obvious how to easily drag and drop stuff between places; it took longer to identify the folder a window is showing (it's a lot easier to identify something if its general shape is different); such a scheme is still not very usable for navigating large hierarchies.

Studies have shown that the target user market do not cope well with deep, complex hierarchies anyway. The new scheme has some obvious advantages for shallow hierarchies: "ah, my spreadsheets folder is here, just where I left it". Bear in mind the eventual impact of the Storage project, too.

The minority of users that can handle complex hierarchies with ease still have an easily available switch to use.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 4, 2004 13:35 UTC (Sun) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link]

"Studies have shown that the target user market..."? What studies? Where? Reference please... Who are the target user market, and where are the studies.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 2, 2004 0:42 UTC (Fri) by gkarabin (guest, #16189) [Link]

The complaint I've most frequently heard about spatial Nautilus is with the number of windows it opens. Ars technica dug into spatial browsing, and points out a few tips that make using it :

http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/004/software/gnome-2.6/gnome-2.6-2.html

In particular, make note of shift-double-left-clicking or double-middle clicking on folders, which closes the parent when you open a child. Also, note the parent hierarchy button in the lower left window.

These two features make spatial browsing much easier for me, so much so that I prefer it to browser mode. That wasn't the case when I first starting using spatial with no knowledge of these features.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 5, 2004 3:39 UTC (Mon) by stephenjudd (subscriber, #3227) [Link]

Exactly. In the original Mac OS Finder implementation, holding down the option key would close the parent window, and I too had exactly the same habits you're developing.

Once you are used to using the GUI for file manipulation (copy|move) the spatial finder becomes invaluable for dragging and dropping.

If all you use the file manager for is inspecting directory contents, I can see how you would find this behaviour annoying. Once you use it to truly manage files, it becomes helpful.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 4, 2004 19:39 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

Actually, moving to "new window for every directory" is a step back towards the original Mac Finder, and away from modern browsers. It's more like moving the accelerator pedal back up as a handle instead.

macintosh GUI was OK

Posted Apr 9, 2004 22:25 UTC (Fri) by anon (guest, #20786) [Link]

This is an opinion, not a fact. Also, a file manager is not a browser.

I personally think the Mac got the file management aspect correct, and "progress" since then has been towards harder-to-use gui's. People are better at quickly picking things out based on location, color, size, than by a complex file name.

However, if you're used to one or the other, it will be easier to use the one you're used to.

I think that having both browser and file manager interfaces on Nautilus is a good design decision.

The Nautilus spatial interface

Posted Apr 8, 2004 21:23 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

> but given that some very smart people have put a lot of effort into this

I will certainly sound a bit trollish, but... Microsoft Windows have this "spatial" feature since Windows 95 -- a whole nine years. It took nine years to realize, that MS solution aren't so evil, but they are really usable sometimes.

GConf

Posted Apr 1, 2004 2:45 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

"One is unpleasantly reminded of the Windows Registry when tinkering with GConf."

We can all agree that it's so much better when apps each have their own configuration file, located in slightly different places under slightly different naming conventions, usually in incompatible file formats requiring swaths of duplicated code to deal with them, with no ability to provide central system administration or lock-down, no change notification, no ability to safely share settings between multiple apps, no ability to store settings in a centralized manner to be available to multiple machines, etc etc. Right?

The only big user-related difference between GNOME's GConf and the nearly identical systems used in KDE, OS X, etc is that GConf has a user-visible graphical tool for modifying the settings files. Yes, that's right, KDE has a configuration system that stores files in XML files, just like GConf, and provides a lot of the same functionality as GConf. Again, the only difference is that KDE apps shove every possible bell and whistle somewhere into the UI. Both of them are just as "unpleasantly" similar to the Windows Registry. GNOME just doesn't hide the config system behind masses of UI clutter.

Is GConf the utopian implementation of a settings database? No. Of course not. It is, however, something that developers, system adminsitrators, and even users actively want. (See first paragraph for reasons why.)

GConf

Posted Apr 1, 2004 8:14 UTC (Thu) by one2team (guest, #7316) [Link]

GConf would have succeeded in not becoming another Windows registry if the Gnome people have payed more attention to the junk they put in their files.

Using an XML format is not a magic way to get readable files (though it *is* possible to get pleasant XML config files as fontconfig attests). You have to work at it just like you have to work on GUI usability. When one takes a look at actual GConf files it's obvious it's seen my most developpers as just another black-box store. In some files you even have *huge* blobs in unrecognizable format stored in a single XML attribute (ie the developper didn't even bother to think about breaking his info into meaningful tags)

The direct result is any gconf install will be bitrotting as fast as any windows registry - a human just won't be able to clean up the mess, and the apps care just as much as the developpers that designed the file formats - ie not at all.

What I like about .conf files

Posted Apr 1, 2004 10:54 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I can see what GConf is getting at and they have made moves to to avoid some of the pitfalls of the Windows registry (the backend is not one big binary blob, if you want you can go at it with a text editor).

I also agree there is probably a lot of duplicate code that GConf removes. The seperating of frontend and backend also makes sense.

However what I miss is comments. My exim.conf is 562 lines long, of which 252 are comments. I find with any complex software the inlined commentry about what each variable is for or why I changed x to y really useful. And I don't see what the current GConf implementation does to replace this most useful feature of plain 'ol configuration formats.

Alex.
p.s. However I can also say that Sendmail and Procmail configurations have made me reach for the yak bucket from time to time....

GConf

Posted Apr 1, 2004 16:04 UTC (Thu) by dlpierson (subscriber, #5124) [Link]

Not to mention that GConf is likely to be missing or hard to find
for those of us who use gnome applications in a non-Gnome environment.

I find the difficulty of changing things like URL handling in Evolution
a real pain because I use Evolution in KDE rather than gnome.

A look at GNOME 2.6

Posted Apr 1, 2004 14:46 UTC (Thu) by jfranks (guest, #1213) [Link]

Epiphany also requires that the user close each browser window individually rather than offering the user the ability to exit all browsers. This may save a user from accidentally closing all of their browser windows when they wish to close only one, but it also requires quite a bit of clicking when a user wishes to exit multiple browser windows.

It is actually worse than that -- you must close each tab in each window separately. This is UI design gone crazy. In order to save new users from occasionally making a mistake all users are significantly penalized -- for ever. This is the one thing which made me abandon epiphany. I really liked many of its features especially the bookmark handling. But I moved to firefox and haven't looked back. Editing bookmarks is something I do rarely, but closing a browser is something I do several times a day. I assume the designers believe that users don't use multiple windows and don't use multiple tabs. I do -- so I chose a browser that supports them conveniently.

I think this is one example among many (especially in Gnome) where "ease of use" has killed functionality. I am worried that Gnome will degenerate to something unsuable except by novices. The novice to which Gnome is catering is a disappearing species. Small children now grow up knowing how to handle fairly complex computer interfaces. It doesn't make sense to design for the senior citizen who is seeing a computer for the first time, but that seems to be what is happening.

The learning curve for a bicycle is much steeper than for a tricycle. And yes, you can get hurt while learning to use a bicycle. But the functionality of a bicycle is so much greater than that of a tricycle that users are willing to pay that price. This lesson has escaped UI designers.