GNOME != Fedora [LWN.net]

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 15:47 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: GNOME != Fedora by jmorris42
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

No... GNOME 3 is NOT trying to be a tablet environment clone. You have to remember that a lot of the "visual feedback" stuff actually started out on Linux... with compiz. Then the Mac got most of it. GNOME 3 is an attempt at a contemporary desktop with modern design concepts (that pre-date the tablet) with compositing and visual feedback. I didn't copy that from anywhere but that's just my understanding.

Was compiz tablet crazy? Was Apple tablet crazy when they started adding visual feedback? Was Microsoft with Vista and Windows 7 Aero? The answer is no.

In fact, many new elements of GNOME 3 and even Unity are there for advanced keyboard users who can hotkey much of what they do. I'm guessing hotkeys are used much on tablets.

It is also primarily a switch to a search driven interface as well... again which DID NOT originate on the tablet.

Tablets have lots of icons on the screen... mainly because their interfaces came from smartphones. Do Unity and GNOME 3 have icons all over the screen? Again, no.

Since you want to use the word crazy I'm happy to swat it back at you and say that you are crazy for trying to map everything tablet onto GNOME 3 and Unity when that simply is not the case.

Of course Canonical recently said that they want Unity to be the single interface for everything so that doesn't help the case I'm trying to defend but much of the GNOME 3 design was around before the iPad even had a name.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:21 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I see the Gnome-3 shell much more of a cross between the the Black Box family of window managers with OS X.

Visually, while in application mode, it looks and behaves very closely like a BB-style window manager; No icons, no task manager to connect to.

The biggest difference between the functionality of Gnome Shell and BlackBox/FuseBox/OpenBox is that the background is inert.

Instead of creating a context to interact with on the background like the BB systems support (scroll on background to switch desktops + click to access menus) it creates a modal 'activities' mode.

Thus it seems to me much more actually along the Linux tradition of having minimal desktops rather then either a Tablet or WIMP-style interface.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:49 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (19 responses)

> No... GNOME 3 is NOT trying to be a tablet environment clone.

It certainly wasn't designed for anyone who actually uses a desktop. Or it was just designed really poorly. Pick one. If you thought the Mac's contribution to repetitive motion health issues with the menu bar locked to the top of the primary display was bad, come on over and try GNOME Shell and we will put ya into early disability pronto! But those design decisions would flow naturally from a use case imagining a tablet with a touch interface. Holding a tablet in both hands would make GNOME Shell a totally different, and more natural, experience because touching opposite sides of the screen wouldn't be a problem. Too bad there aren't any tablets that can run GNOME Shell. However we mortal users are capable of noticing these things.

And it is annoying the heck out of us when an interface that we are familiar with and actually liked is removed and replaced with one that is pretty obviously designed for hardware we DON'T HAVE and CAN'T BUY. We might could be convinced that we want a touch screen but the point is moot since there aren't any to be had. Then we complain and are told to shut up and accept the change, because there will be NO discussion of reviving the old desktop. It is onward and upward into the sunny uplands of history. If we were the sort who could be bullied like that we would be using iProducts.

As far as I'm concerned anger long ago faded into disgust and distrust. Used GNOME from pre 1.0 on RedHat up through F12; now I'm on XFCE and doubt I'd go back to GNOME unless some outside group forked 3.0 and ported the old desktop to it because I no longer trust the judgement of the current GNOMEs.

> Of course Canonical recently said that they want Unity
> to be the single interface for everything..

And KDE is blabbering on about tablets. Microsoft's impending Metro/Windows 8 trainwreck is all about the notion that everybody wants a touchscreen and is willing to toss all displays that don't have a multi-touch interface. Apple is making each release of OS X more like iOS. And yes I have heard enough tablet/touch talk from the GNOMEs to justify the suspicion that you too are infected with touch madness.

> so that doesn't help the case I'm trying to defend but much of
> the GNOME 3 design was around before the iPad even had a name.

No, the iPad didn't exist yet. But everyone has been obsessed over iOS since the first iPhone. What works on a four inch screen isn't right on a twenty four inch screen.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:05 UTC (Fri) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

You are claiming that Gnome 3.X is adding to RSI ("If you thought the Mac's contribution to repetitive motion health issues with the menu bar locked to the top of the primary display was bad, come on over and try GNOME Shell and we will put ya into early disability pronto!").

I personally feel that I use the mouse less than in Gnome 2.X, so it would be interesting if you could expand on this issue.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:32 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (17 responses)

> And KDE is blabbering on about tablets.

... we aren't altering the desktop shell to do this, however. We use the same underlying frameworks and implementations to create a touch-centric tablet focussed user experience that is separate from the Plasma Desktop shell.

that they share an amazing amount of code between them is what allows us to do this, but we have no desire nor intention to either abandon the desktop nor to diminish the desktop shell due to having a parallel tablet environment.

form factor optimized interfaces that work together ... or put another way, diversity with compatibility.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:18 UTC (Fri) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link] (16 responses)

KDE made some dubious decisions as well, although not necessarily UI-related. Its current push for Semantic Desktop is one of them - years (of CPU time) will pass before this project bears fruit, if any at all.

I am not in position to complain, though - these days, running free software (and not being otherwise involved in its development) is basically participating in someone's experiment or PR campaign - akin to using free email or reading free (and ad-filled) newspapers.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:40 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (15 responses)

Plasma Active One is built around the semantic desktop technologies and would not work without them. i'd call that "bearing fruit".

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 22:07 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (13 responses)

Well, I still don't understand WHY I need a semantic desktop at all.

My KDE taskbar doesn't work correctly on KUbuntu 11.10, but I can share it over the network (what for?!?!). KDE 3.5 had wonderful multi-desktop support but now I not only have multi-desktop, but multiple activities each with its own widget set.

Then there's a question of usability. Nepomuk allows me to reassure myself that all my music is in ~/Music, but there's no way to find which program uses a certain keyboard shortcut.

So, what are the use-cases for the whole 'semantic desktop' thingie? I have yet been able to find one.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 12:27 UTC (Sat) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (10 responses)

My KDE taskbar doesn't work correctly on KUbuntu 11.10

What do you mean by "doesn't work correctly"?

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 13:08 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (9 responses)

Probably "it doesn't do what I want, and I can't find out how to change it!".

KDE is busted for me, too, in some respects - it's not network transparent! I have an old system I use as a terminal.

Log in over xdm, and I get NO notification window. And mounting comes back "only root can mount this device". WHY? That's important to me because I switch between computers and would like my experience to be identical!

Cheers,
Wol

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 0:08 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (4 responses)

The "bug" you describe is by design--local console users are allowed to mount removable devices, remote users are not. This is enforced by PolicyKit, not KDE. It seems like a reasonable default to me, though obviously not suitable for everyone.

Placing the following text in a .pkla file under /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/ should allow you to access removable devices via the udisks service (as used by recent KDE versions, or on the command-line via "udisks --mount $dev") regardless of whether you are a local or remote user:

[udisk Permissions]
Identity=unix-user:$your_username
Action=org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-check;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-lsof;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-eject;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-detach;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-change;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-luks-unlock;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-inhibit-polling;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-set-spindown
ResultAny=yes

Note that the org.freedesktop.* action IDs are all on one line, with no spaces. Replace "$your_username" with your actual UNIX username. The first line is just a label; feel free to change it.

See also pklocalauthority(8) or <http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/pklocalauthority.8...>.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 3:13 UTC (Sun) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (3 responses)

It looks like someone has been drinking a little too much Java there...

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 6:07 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (2 responses)

Are you referring to the format of the configuration file? The INI format, predates Java, of course, and the reverse-DNS naming convention is standard in many situations where unrelated organizations must provide unique IDs. So far as I am aware there is no Java code in any of these components.

It would have been helpful of the action names were grouped a bit better; you can use glob patterns, but the org.freedesktop.udisks.* actions are a mixture of normal user actions (e.g. "mount removable filesystem") and things which should require administrative privileges (e.g. "manage the LVM subsystem" or "lock encrypted LUKS devices unlocked by other users"). I didn't see any obvious combination of positive glob patterns which would be sure to select just the normal user actions, short of listing them all. Renaming the actions enabled by default for interactive sessions to something like org.freedesktop.udisks.safe.* would have allowed for a much more compact configuration, but I realize that has its own issues. Groups, or multiple Action= lines, would be nice. Perhaps the ability to filter actions based on a glob pattern plus the current Result* settings ("allow all udisk actions which this user could use in an active session"). Or at least some (documented) way to break values over multiple lines.

There used to be a GUI for configuring PolicyKit permissions, but apparently no one's updated it for the PolKit-1 redesign.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 16:32 UTC (Sun) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a GUI for KDE at least, called "polkit-kde-kcmodules-1" upstream (but it hasn't actually been released yet). In Gentoo, we package a snapshot of this repo dated 2010-11-27. This GUI integrates itself with the rest of KDE System Settings.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 7, 2011 20:26 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Thanks all of you for the info.

And I run gentoo :-)

iirc it used to work the way I want, until a recent KDE update dragged in polkit, consolekit, etc etc. Then I started swearing ... :-) part of the trouble is I haven't got the knack of finding the docu - whether I can't think of the right keywords for Google or not I don't know.

Cheers,
Wol

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 8:08 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Nope, just a simple bug - buttons with window names become squashed as if the taskbar is overflowing.

Additionally, windows are added to the _right_ side of the taskbar, not to the left (and no, I don't have Arabic or Hebrew locale set).

I've reported it, but no result so far.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 23:38 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

There is a good reason that doesn't work. Device Notifications are only sent to the user on the local console attached to the machine, not to remote users. There is no way to reliably and consistently handle notifications or access to devices in the remote user case, what would the system do when there are multiple remote users? Even if there is only one user logged in remotely, the first of N remote users shouldn't behave differently, that would be very weird in a multiuser environment

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 23:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

what do you do if there are multiple remote users? you notify them all of course.

sending notifications to all users, local or remote is something that has been done for decades on unix systems.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:22 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Many if not most of the hardware access that is appropriate for a local console user, to network, audio, and storage devices is not appropriate for remote users. The OP was asking why they couldn't change local device settings when logged in remotely. There are certainly cases where we want to send a notice to all logged in users but for many of the desktop notifications related to local hardware you probably don't want to broadcast them to all users and you probably don't want all users to have automatically privileged read/write access when plugging in a removable drive for example. It's a much simpler default policy to just draw a line between local console users and remote.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 15:06 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

Sometimes you need to use the final version of something before you see why it is handy. E.g. smartphones. They've been calling various phones smartphones, while the only thing they could do is e.g. bluetooth and a calendar. Now loads of people cannot live without them.

I expect semanic desktop to be similar. Added value atm is low (it seems, don't use KDE), in future: everything it provides would be considered normal by the users and if you don't have it your phone/pc is just ancient.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 8:12 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I could see potential in smartphones long before iPhone. Implementations were lacking, but the possibilities were there. I don't really understand what is the endpoint of the Semantic Desktop.

I kinda like KDE visually, especially compared to GNOME3 [S]hell is. But that semantic desktop fixation is killing me.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2011 22:08 UTC (Fri) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link]

We will see whether there are actual advantages provided by it - hopefully Semantic Desktop (a misnomer?) will fare better on _tablets_ than on desktop proper, where I am not aware of anything that would justify paying Nepomuk tax.

If you could point me to a comprehensible and practical use case of Semantic Desktop/Tablet features, I'll gladly be educated.