Otte: staring into the abyss
In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places."
Posted Jul 27, 2012 14:32 UTC (Fri)
by rriggs (guest, #11598)
[Link] (12 responses)
The point to the upper left corner to get to my list of applications is just plain stupid. It's unintuitive as hell. It disrupts my workflow.
And the dynamic desktops -- really, I have been using this for almost a year now and I'm still beside myself in frustration every day. I want 4 desktops. Really, I want 1 virtual desktop that is 4 windows wide (on a rotatable cube -- that was really fun and intuitive).
But, no. I am told I really don't want these things. "Give it time and you will see what a wonderful GUI we have created for you." Bollocks! A year on and I am more convinced than ever that the Gnome 3 way is utter crap.
Gnome folks: revert!!!
Posted Jul 27, 2012 14:43 UTC (Fri)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (5 responses)
But on Linux the distributions either automatically replace GNOME 2 with GNOME 3 because of the higher version number, or else they go off in their own direction with some replacement like Unity or Cinnamon (or KDE). There isn't a critical mass around keeping the desktop essentially the same. Maybe if 'enterprise Linux' were more of a success on the desktop, not just the server, the picture would be different.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 15:30 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
In fact, my Windows 8 desktop looks and behaves almost like Win98. The only major difference is the lack of quickstart bar.
Posted Jul 30, 2012 6:05 UTC (Mon)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (1 responses)
Did you mean Windows 7, or are you running a beta of Windows 8?
If you're running Windows 7, you can add the quicklaunch bar back. I did exactly that on my corporate laptop.
And the point holds: I can make Windows 7 more or less behave like Windows 95, just with minor refinements. That's 17 years of refinement. Sure, XP had a radical new look ...that you could turn off. And Windows 7 had a radical new look ...that you could turn off. My desktop looks rather similar to a Windows Server 2000 machine with virtual desktops (thanks to VirtuaWin). All the horror stories I hear about Gnome 3 keep me from trying a more recent Linux distro. It's kinda sad when I'm less reluctant to upgrade Windows than Linux.
Posted Jul 30, 2012 8:42 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2012 14:20 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
How's Trinity doing? I don't remember seeing anything about it in the recent past. For those who don't know / can't remember, that's the code name for the ongoing KDE3 fork - it appears to have died, so it's KDE4 or no KDE for you!
But as you say, if we had decent penetration into the enterprise desktop, I'm sure that there would be a desire for stability and we'd get a good desktop that didn't see the need to chase the latest fads. That said, we want *some* desktops to chase fads, otherwise how would we find new stuff we really *do* want?!
Cheers,
Posted Jul 28, 2012 17:11 UTC (Sat)
by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)
[Link]
That said, interest seems to have successively dropped of as KDE fixed most issues people had with early KDE4 in later KDE SC 4.x releases.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 15:11 UTC (Fri)
by mikapfl (subscriber, #84646)
[Link]
Also, I like how everything works well in fullscreen or split-screen modus by just "throwing" the window to the left/right or the top.
Of course, there's stuff that annoys me too, of course. But there were annoyances in 2.32 as well. All in all I think the GNOME developers did a very thorough job with GNOME 3.
So, while I agree it would be nice if everybody could be made happy by GNOME 3, I just wanted to point out that some users are made happy by GNOME 3. It seems as if you aren't, but there are plenty of options for you: For example, debian's GNOME 3 classic mode, which works mostly like GNOME 2.32 with a new theme. Maybe you should check that out.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 15:26 UTC (Fri)
by Ben_P (guest, #74247)
[Link] (1 responses)
I was running gnome-do, so I was already using the super (windows key in my case) for launching programs.
Ctrl+alt+shift+direction still swaps the focused window to whichever direction work space. Speaking of work spaces, having them collapse to however many I'm use just means I never have to play with that setting any more. On 2.x I'd have to fiddle with it every so often for certain work loads trading off for toolbar space.
Alt+tab works as expected for a quick tap. The new(?) feature to hold it and select windows from the same program, or however that mechanic decides to separate them, works well for the most part. Some way to manually fix it's grouping would be nice, but it isn't a terrible stumbling block.
The menu for quick launch seems like it shouldn't get paged out as often as it does, but at least on fedora 16 and 17 that seems like a gnome-shell issue which is just most noticeable at that time. On a related note, it is nice to see gnome-shell fix itself after crashes. When my gnome-shell does rarely lock up or have some issue, it seems to automagically know to restart the gnome-shell process without effecting any of my active windows or shells.
I hear lots of complaints about gnome 2 to 3 but it's been really enjoyable for me.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 16:07 UTC (Fri)
by dashesy (guest, #74652)
[Link]
Posted Jul 27, 2012 21:13 UTC (Fri)
by faassen (guest, #1676)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2012 7:59 UTC (Sat)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link]
You are wasting your time, my friend. You will be told by Gnome 3 lovers that instead of using your mouse, you should use your keyboard (and if you check the comments below yours, this is exactly how the read).
Never mind that on a decent sized display one doesn't need to remove the current view to start an app. Oh, no! We'll be doing everything the "smartphone" way. Got it? ;-)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 13:52 UTC (Sat)
by augustl (guest, #75060)
[Link]
So it achieves the same goal as the Gnome setup - flexible amount of workspaced created on demand - only you get reliable behaviour that doesn't depend on how many workspaces you actually use right now.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 14:34 UTC (Fri)
by amtota (guest, #4012)
[Link] (8 responses)
Now that Linus has said the same thing, and that pretty much everyone I know who has tried gnome3 thinks it is a complete disaster, surely things can only get better from here?
Posted Jul 27, 2012 14:44 UTC (Fri)
by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133)
[Link]
Posted Jul 27, 2012 21:15 UTC (Fri)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2012 17:57 UTC (Sat)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link] (5 responses)
I've been using Gnome 3 from the start, and (after a few weeks of feeling totally lost) I now love it. But my opinion doesn't count...
Posted Jul 28, 2012 20:18 UTC (Sat)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
(Assuming anything else would be conspiratorial madness. And yes, there really are some people who espouse the belief that the American continent doesn't exist!)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 15:03 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 23:13 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
:P
Posted Aug 3, 2012 1:51 UTC (Fri)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (1 responses)
I manage labs used by library patrons. GNOME2 looks like what they expect a computer to look like. Could you imagine what would happen if I rolled out GNOME3 and then started telling the shocked and outraged people "oh, don't worry. In a couple of weeks of intensive use you will learn to love it."
Posted Aug 7, 2012 12:49 UTC (Tue)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link]
Posted Jul 27, 2012 14:39 UTC (Fri)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (40 responses)
That sounds like bad news for a couple of important and widespread projects, like inkscape, gimp or mypaint. And I couldn't care less about gnome, the project or the desktop, but those applications are important to so many people and have so much effort invested in them, starving their foundations is scary.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 15:01 UTC (Fri)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Jul 27, 2012 17:44 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Jul 27, 2012 17:56 UTC (Fri)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (3 responses)
The development efficiency gains, which are likely entirely illusionary, don't offset the trashing of an entire software ecosystem. There are plenty of examples close at hand.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 18:15 UTC (Fri)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 22:30 UTC (Sat)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
I imagine that things have moved backwards in the last few years, then. For a long time people complained about Windows and OS X support, and for a short while it looked like all the pieces were in place, but now we might be back where we were before: so much for that "ISV friendly" weak-copyleft-tending-towards-permissive licensing that meant that anyone doing the portability grunt-work was likely to keep it to themselves rather than share and collaborate; there's a danger that Qt could go the same way if various companies write off their investments. It's all very sad and a reflection of the last five years or so in the wider free desktop scene.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 12:50 UTC (Sun)
by Frej (guest, #4165)
[Link]
And GTK3 works better with the quartz backend than gtk2 ever did, i think the loadable backends helps quite a bit here.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 4:28 UTC (Sat)
by daniel (guest, #3181)
[Link] (1 responses)
Who said anything about rewriting everything? For one thing, the entire back end should stay unchanged, and if it can't because it lived its entire life so far joined at the hip to its GUI then that needed fixing anyway. Fix any places like that as the first step of the rewrite while still staying with GTK. That is normally a fairly easy iterative process.
Then... enjoy the ease and rapid development of QT. It's just really easy and pleasant, speaking from experience. And keep the GTK interface around as a compilation option so long as it is not too much of a burden.
In any case, the basic structure of the interface will not change because QT follows essentially the same model (register a widget; register layouts in the widget; register subwidgets in the layouts; connect UI events to program actions). Except easier to write and easier to debug, easier to get the defaults right, and easier to add new functionality in a generic way.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 7:55 UTC (Sat)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Drag did.
In any case, while there might be some way to do a semi-automated port (KDAB has tools for that, they used to port lots of code from Motif to Qt), I don't consider such a scenario as realistic. You can quibble about the difference between "rewriting everything" or "just adding another front-end", but the fact remains: it's a nearly impossible amount of work.
I'm not sure Raven667 got the point, though -- he talks about "the development efficiency gains, which are likely entirely illusionary". The issue isn't that these huge and important projects would enjoy the benefits of working with Qt, it's that they don't die because their platform is starving to death.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 7:46 UTC (Sun)
by bluebugs (guest, #71022)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 10:56 UTC (Tue)
by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
[Link]
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA you, sir, win at the Internets today.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 15:05 UTC (Fri)
by kragil (guest, #34373)
[Link] (21 responses)
Red Hat is pulling the strings here, so just tell them to switch to Qt and just by that change Destop Linux might have its year coming some day. Qt-project.org is a much more healthy base to build the future on than the GTK quicksand.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 15:27 UTC (Fri)
by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873)
[Link]
On a side note, having "one toolkit" would be a great development. Next up, getting everyone to abandon vi.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 21:09 UTC (Fri)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (6 responses)
It does seem that lately they've either been hiring more people, or there are less people from other companies. As maintainers tend to set the direction, if you have more from one company, you get more group think. Too much developers from any company (I don't care which) is bad for the community.
Still, I am not paid by Red hat, and the same for various others.
Though I guess that the "GTK quicksand" mention said enough.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 22:50 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (5 responses)
My thesis is that corporate interests, across the industry, tend towards differentiation at the UI layer. Market forces but the emphasis is on competition and less on cooperation at that layer because UI is intimately related to brand identity.
So anytime one entity dominates a UI oriented project, market forces compel a competitor to avoid deeply investing in the same UI experience because they need to differentiate to build their competing brand presence in the marketplace.
Its just the way it works out, regardless of anyone's intentions or desire to work together. The need to differentiate your product wins out.
And we don't have to look at contemporary market dynamics between corporate entities to see and example of this. Historically, Even the Hildon framework from Nokia, started out as an out-of-scope adaptation of GNOME before it was integrated back into the GNOME product(near the end of life of Nokia's product offering using Hildon) . Nokia shipped Hildon based UI on consumer products before Hildon was even considered for integration into GNOME itself.
-jef
Posted Jul 27, 2012 23:10 UTC (Fri)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jul 27, 2012 23:23 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (2 responses)
Google is the corporate backer of the Android UI code at this point. What other corporate entity is contributing back to the UI look and feel of Android? Or for that matter Dalvik as a framework element that makes that UI possible? Is there another software company that is making a sustained and continued investment in Android UI development?
-jef
Posted Jul 28, 2012 12:37 UTC (Sat)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (1 responses)
So your argument about the need to diversify the UI layer falls flat as far as I can see.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:58 UTC (Sun)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
You also have a lot of widely criticised messing around with user interface shells on top of Android, apparently. None of this work gets contributed to Android because the companies involved want to keep the supposed benefits of such work to themselves.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 23:34 UTC (Fri)
by kragil (guest, #34373)
[Link]
Maybe the Gnome Foundation or the Linux Foundation should hire someone independent that sets goals and the direction.
The Linux desktop is too much like commerical Unices in the 80s and 90s.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 0:21 UTC (Sat)
by nwmcsween (guest, #62367)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 4:39 UTC (Sat)
by daniel (guest, #3181)
[Link] (2 responses)
QT subsystems are pretty nicely independent. If you don't want to use a particular subsystem, animation for example, just don't and it costs you nothing. No extra coding, no extra memory, no extra startup time.
In important cases like OpenGL programming, QT can provide a very thin layer indeed, and nearly all your code is just normal OpenGL. The part that isn't is typically about the same amount of code as the part that would be GLUT if you used GLUT. Or if you would prefer to work with QT's canvas and scene graph (taking advantage of tens of manyears of software engineering) then go ahead and do that. It's a thicker abstraction indeed, but considerably lighter than Open Inventor or Java 3D for example.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 7:41 UTC (Sun)
by bluebugs (guest, #71022)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 11:39 UTC (Sun)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2012 14:30 UTC (Sat)
by quintesse (guest, #14569)
[Link] (4 responses)
Well yes, but if one of the goals is to run on multiple platforms you won't get very far with EFL. The fact that Qt has so many abstractions also makes it pretty easy to write an application that works on all supported platforms, no mean feat.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 7:59 UTC (Sun)
by bluebugs (guest, #71022)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 11:26 UTC (Sun)
by quintesse (guest, #14569)
[Link] (2 responses)
But if it's easier to port because there's much less code to maintain it's also because it will give you a lot less basis to build your applications upon I guess. That's the strength of Qt, that it tries to abstract away most of the things you'd need for any kind of application. Of course it also means that porting it is a heck of a job that will leave all kinds of smaller platforms behind.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 11:44 UTC (Sun)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 12:10 UTC (Sun)
by quintesse (guest, #14569)
[Link]
Posted Jul 30, 2012 21:56 UTC (Mon)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link] (3 responses)
Is there even anecdotal evidence of a single, larger project that would have successfully switched (just) its UI from Gtk to Qt, or vice verse, and survived the transition?
AFAIK e.g. Nokia's switch from Gtk in N900 to Qt in N9 was a total rewrite, and I wouldn't necessarily consider the result as something that survived.
Maybe closest to successful Gtk2 -> Qt UI transition is Dillo www-browser, which switched from Gtk1 to Fltk2 C++ toolkit?
Posted Jul 31, 2012 6:35 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 23:02 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 1, 2012 20:40 UTC (Wed)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link]
The switch from the Motif was of course needed because that stuff was ancient already back then, but I had understood that it wasn't just UI toolkit switch, but more like a total rewrite of the application (and either can kill a project like almost happened with Rosegarden).
As to LyX, that is a good example. Regarding its multi-toolkit support, I think its Xforms and Qt UIs were the only ones that were properly supported. I don't remember the Gtk interface ever working properly, it was always lacking a lot of features.
Does LyX still have multi-toolkit support (can't check that now as LyX site doesn't seem to be responding) and are/were there any other as complex open source projects that support multiple toolkits?
Posted Jul 27, 2012 18:42 UTC (Fri)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (7 responses)
Fwiw, here's the same analysis for the projects you mentioned:
So there's 5 part-time hackers competing with Adobe! I bet they have bigger fish to fry than worrying about their toolkit. And GTK2 will not just go away
Posted Jul 27, 2012 18:56 UTC (Fri)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (6 responses)
I'm quite sure that there is not a single full-time developer working on gimp, though Michael Natterer is awesome, of course, but he's not paid to work on gimp. (Ohloh statistics are quite misleading, though, since they don't track git branches. I've got two full-time developers on Krita now, but that doesn't show up because the work only gets merged when done.)
The problem with GTK2 isn't that it will go disappear, it's that it's unmaintained and the bugs are getting very annoying. Like when gimp had to release 2.8 on Windows with broken Wacom tablet support because of a GTK bug.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 0:28 UTC (Sat)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (5 responses)
Yeah. Yeah, they have that.
Posted Jul 30, 2012 13:14 UTC (Mon)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 10:59 UTC (Tue)
by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
[Link] (1 responses)
I said multiple times, even to Benjamin, that I'm not stepping down from developing and maintaining Clutter. I also am not stepping down from my roles in the GNOME community - including being on the Board of the GNOME Foundation. I honestly don't know what crack Benjamin decided to smoke, but I would have appreciated if he didn't include me in his paranoid attempt at destroying the GNOME community from inside out.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 22:42 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jul 31, 2012 11:02 UTC (Tue)
by jku (subscriber, #42379)
[Link] (1 responses)
So yeah, I guess they do have that.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 23:06 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jul 27, 2012 15:34 UTC (Fri)
by dcg (subscriber, #9198)
[Link] (50 responses)
The official developers keep working on its Gnome 3 and making releases, but most people who uses gnome-based desktops don't use the real Gnome 3 desktop. The majority uses whatever Ubuntu ships (Unity), and many other gnome enthusiasts use xfce or cinnamon. Meanwhile, the "Official Gnome" project keeps working on a desktop vision that most people won't use. I would not be surprised if these people eventually tries to build a community that works on a desktop that people actually cares about.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 18:34 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (26 responses)
Until Linux distributions finally break themselves and are willing to make a changes necessary to be a good desktop OS no Linux DE is ever going to progress beyond were it is at now.
It's not healthy for a project to be in a stale environment with no new blood or new interest. There really isn't anything Gnome can do about it right at this moment.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 20:06 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (25 responses)
This is not true at all. We have not one, but two viable contenders. Sure, they are not yet there. Even Gnome3 is better… for now. But they are improving and, more importantly, they offer viable desktop platform for the third-party developers. And in the end third-party developers make or break the desktop platform.
Posted Jul 27, 2012 22:27 UTC (Fri)
by BradReed (subscriber, #5917)
[Link] (20 responses)
Posted Jul 27, 2012 23:09 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (17 responses)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 19:57 UTC (Sat)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link] (13 responses)
If anything, GNOME and Xfce are farther apart than they've ever been. Just compare a default install of GNOME and a default install of Xfce, and tell me how many similarities you see. Not many.
I view Xfce as the working man's desktop because it enables you to get stuff done with a minimum of yak-shaving. Rather than focusing on "the semantic desktop" (like KDE4) or chasing dreams of Linux tablets (like GNOME3), Xfce focused on delivering a usable desktop with no drama. And it has succeeded. It may not be as exciting as a catastrophic rewrite-from-scratch or as trendy as HTML5, but it's actually usable. I hope more distros consider using it as the default desktop.
Another thing Xfce gets right is not re-inventing wheels. GNOME has its own office suite (GnomeOffice), its own IDE (Anjuta), its own CD ripper (Sound Juicer), and on and on. Xfce takes the approach that if a perfectly usable program already exists for a task, it doesn't need to be re-invented.
P.S. I've done the "old-school WM" thing before too. I used xfvwm for a few years, and even used twm. None of those environments was as productive as Xfce because there was inevitably a yak to be shaved-- a configuration file that had to be edited by hand, or a bash script that had to be tweaked. Xfce is a great project and it's really worth a look, if you haven't tried it.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 14:52 UTC (Sun)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (7 responses)
+1 We use Debian Squeeze at work. When we move to Wheezy, I'll be transitioning all the non-technical users from GNOME 2 to XFCE because I think that transition will be easier on them than GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 16:18 UTC (Sun)
by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 19:09 UTC (Sun)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
I'll take old XFCE 4.8 over new GNOME 3 any day. Besides, as far as the end-user experience goes, I don't think there's that much difference between XFCE 4.10 and XFCE 4.8.
Posted Jul 30, 2012 22:00 UTC (Mon)
by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 0:50 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
Posted Jul 31, 2012 2:36 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (2 responses)
Not. GNOME classic means I have to go do configuration on all the boxes, whereas switching to XFCE is simply apt-get install xfce4.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 19:09 UTC (Tue)
by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 1, 2012 17:09 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
Hmm, OK. Didn't know that.
However, I think XFCE has more of a future than GNOME Classic and I don't want to have to force my users to change again in a year or two's time.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 11:45 UTC (Tue)
by rossburton (subscriber, #7254)
[Link] (3 responses)
I wrote SJ originally because there wasn't anything else. At the time the cutting edge GNOME-friendly ripper was Grip, and after wasting a week of constant ripping because I typo'd one of the patterns I decided that enough was enough and wrote a replacement.
SJ is part of the GNOME release but it hasn't actually depended on anything GNOMEy for some time now, so the current releases will fit in fine once Xfce moves to GTK+ 3 (or use SJ 2.32, and bring in a small library from gnome-media).
I was curious to see what Xfce recommended as a CD ripper. The wiki page recommends an app that appears to be unmaintained now, and the xubuntu metapackage doesn't appear to pull in a CD ripper (maybe I missed it, or it's integrated into something else).
Posted Aug 5, 2012 6:52 UTC (Sun)
by dirtyepic (guest, #30178)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:17 UTC (Thu)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:18 UTC (Thu)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link]
Posted Aug 19, 2012 12:56 UTC (Sun)
by philomath (guest, #84172)
[Link]
Posted Jul 29, 2012 8:19 UTC (Sun)
by bluebugs (guest, #71022)
[Link] (2 responses)
The main reason E17 was never released is that it reached the good enough state and nobody cared to make the last step. In fact most of our community is focusing on the library instead of releasing application. Thanks now, some people are taking care of that last move. But the good enough and the fact that we were fine in our sandbox is the main reason of this slowness.
So don't dismiss technology if you don't know there story and what they can do.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 11:10 UTC (Tue)
by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
[Link] (1 responses)
which is... what, precisely? which one of the bajillion libraries (with runtime loadable modules as separate shared objects), all of them thread-unsafe, with no documentation, and no comments (except for the sporadic 'printf("WAAAAAAA")' ifdeffed out), with a runtime type system based on magic, hardcoded strings and public structs of virtual functions, is the "modern cleanly designed toolkit" you're blabbing about? because I haven't seen anything like that in the Subversion repository (and, really? Subversion?) everything inside the collection of random pieces of junk that is known as "EFL" screams bad design, bad implementation, bad software engineering and release management practices. it's a disgrace that this utter, utter joke of a project has been allowed to go this far, and con lots of money, time, and effort out of users, developers, and companies. have you ever asked yourself why there isn't any documentation on how to create a complex EFL-based application? or, for that matter, why there is no complex EFL-based application at all, except Enlightenment, and now closed sources apps from Samsung and their phones? have you ever wondered why the EFL backend for WebKit is using GLib, libsoup, cairo, gstreamer, and other GNOME technologies? hint: it's because they work, exist, and are designed, developed, and released by competent developers. Enlightenment is a joke, and a bad one at that. the fact that you're using it is utterly inconsequential to its quality, or its development practices. unless you are one of the contributors, to which I would reply that you are a terrible, terrible person, and are directly responsible to two awful weeks of my life in which I tried to work on that horrible code base for my former job, and that I would love to get them back.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 14:44 UTC (Tue)
by bluebugs (guest, #71022)
[Link]
Documentation : http://web.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=docs&l=en . As you can see, updated daily and available online easily.
"Bad implementation, bad design, bad software engineering", man you are really shooting yourself in the foot here. Enlightenment is faster, lighter and yet more powerful than any thing you can compare it to. Writing a terminal emulator from scratch took 1 month as a pet project, and beat hands down every other terminal emulator in speed and effect (memory when comparing it with tabless emulator). If that's what you get by bad implementation, bad design and bad software engineering, every one should start doing bad stuff that would help !
As for big application, the main reason is that nobody in the Enlightenment community were interested by replacing existing application. We were having fun in our sandbox, didn't bother doing marketing and didn't try to get more users/developers. You may have notice that we do have around 30 people working permanently on all EFL libraries (when GTK only get one), that's because people in our communities have fun with improving and tunning this libraries. But things are evolving. That's why we now have release and are starting communicating. That's why we do start writing more application. Because we also thing that it's a time that require us to speak. Let see if in two years we don't get big applications written in EFL.
About WebKit, well it was a GTK port that was moved to EFL (That does prove my point to a previous thread where moving to EFL is doable), so obviously not all technology get replaced. And what GNOME technologies are you speaking about ? Cairo, Gstreamer ? Are you sure they where created by and for GNOME ? Are you sure you can be so proud of their current state ?
As for the fact, we did have a Cairo backend for Evas, we scratched it because it was to slow and never was close to the performance we had with our own software backend. The only reason we need it is for vector graphics, and we are close to have an alternative that is already way faster. And Gstreamer, on any PC, VideoLan give better result, it's more stable and use less resource. We do use Gstreamer, because that's the only choice we have in the embedded world today, but frankly on a desktop go with VideoLan !
By reading your comment, I guess you were forced to look at EFL and took it as a personal attack on your own work. Did your management ask you to dumb all your past work because it didn't perform correctly ? Seriously you go on personal attack here, and it really look to me like EFL did beat the code you did write in the past without giving you a little chance to catch-up. I feel sorry for you, but if one day you calm down and really want to learn about how a modern toolkit should be designed and why, I will be happy to have a drink and discuss that matter with you.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 7:57 UTC (Sat)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2012 13:58 UTC (Sat)
by augustl (guest, #75060)
[Link]
Posted Jul 27, 2012 23:19 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (3 responses)
(Which I consider a good thing even though Google itself doesn't seem particularly trustworthy. But hey, this is the reason we have open source.)
I still think it is entirely and 100% possible for a true Linux desktop to thrive and attract user and developer attention on a scale that will surpass Apple desktop by a factor of two or ythree. Not that I am picking on Apple or anything.. but just illustrates the size I believe is possible.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 20:07 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Well, that's the point. It's obvious that distributions will never agree to provide stable platform for third-party developers and as was discussed many times this is the very first step on the road to the Joe Average. Android and ChromeOS do provide such a platform. Sure, right now it's much poorer then what you have on desktop, but it steadily improves over time - you can not say that about other Linux desktop environments. Sadly "true Linux desktop" does not care about being usable platform. It's built around the idea that applications must be adopted/recompiled for the particular flavor of desktop. This is what killed "big Unix" and this what kills Linux desktop today. Sure, it' not 100% apples-to-apples comparison: "big Unix" vendors tried to make sure it'll be hard to port application from one flavor to another while Linux desktop environments favor cooperation. Still ISVs don't want to play these games at all: they want to build an application once and sell it many times - direct opposite of "true Linux desktop". And without ISVs "true Linux desktop" have no chance in hell.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 21:20 UTC (Sun)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (1 responses)
Once the DEs realize that most people just want to work without having to relearn everything every five years, then Linux might have a chance on the desktop. (Microsoft is about to learn this the hard way itself...)
Comparing to Apple is exactly right. They slip only two or three invasive changes into each release, and include config items to set things back to the way they were. After five years, most people are happy with the defaults and the config items go away. It's very well done.
I just wish a leading Linux DE would start thinking long term like this. Changing everything all at once is never OK.
Posted Aug 3, 2012 6:21 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
But Apple did that too! But this was done in similar fashion: for many years Macs were sold with two operation systems—MacOS 8 (later MacOS 9) and MacOS X. First MacOS 8 was a default, then MacOS X become a default, but it still included full-blown MacOS Classic emulator and only years later MacOS Classic was finally removed. This is transition from one OS to another, radically different one. GNOME kept a lot of plumbing around yet still broke everything on "one go". I don't think they'll do. It looks like they've lost this capability. The fact that they want to repeat cavalier WP7 switch (similar to GNOME3 switch) with WP8 switch shows that they lost all the people who understood why "redo everything with a flag-day switchover" is a single worst strategic mistake. Sometimes total rewrite produces good end result (the very example Joel uses shows that because it gave us Firefox), but this basically kills the project and starts new one in it's place. Again: look on the MacOS Classic to MacOS X transition if you want to see how to do such switchover right. Heck, look on DOS to Windows and Windows Classic to Windows XP+ transtion (where Windows-on-top-of-DOS was kept around for years while people slowly migrated to new, Windows NT-based architecture). It's really surprising to see disaster Microsoft makes with these transitions today: people who are driving Microsoft today were there back when Microsoft knew how to do that (including Ballmer). Have they forgotten everything? Have they gone mad? What exactly happened?
Posted Jul 27, 2012 22:56 UTC (Fri)
by misc (subscriber, #73730)
[Link] (22 responses)
I can understand that people do not like gnome-shell like they do not like kde, 3 or ' or anything, but the lack of tolerance displayed "if I do not like, then no one will like" is really bafling. And that's likely what make people not listen.
Ranting on gnome 3 has become a national sport it seems ( except on ubuntu where ranting on unity has become a sport too, from what I have seen at Ubuntu events i attended, and with the same pattern ). At least, when people disliked kde4, they had in the end more precise reasons like "it is crashing too much"
Posted Jul 28, 2012 8:32 UTC (Sat)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (20 responses)
- It now takes more mouse moves/clicks to start an app, change a workspace etc. (not to mention complete lack of workspace visibility). To this Gnome 3 brigade responds with the baffling "use you keyboard" mantra. Huh?
- Users are attacked by unnecessary view changes for even the most trivial of actions, like starting an app. Regular desktop has plenty of pixels to overlay a menu without view change, unlike a smartphone. Gnome 3 brigade respond to this with even more baffling "you are being distracted by the menu and the taskbar" mantra. Double huh?
- It is impossible to do even the most trivial of customisations (e.g. removing an icon from the panel) without writing code or convincing someone to do it. Combinatorial explosion of extensions is mind boggling. To this Gnome 3 brigade respond with "this is progress" mantra. Completely lost by now...
So, it's not about "I don't like". It's about "simple things are more complicated now". These are called regressions.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 14:46 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (19 responses)
My biggest bug-bears are (1) being expected to use the mouse, and (2) bloody autocomplete! If I want to type "10 Jan 2012" I don't want to end up with the system recognising the year and giving me "10 Jan 2012-07-28"!!!
Don't forget. The whole point of being a touch typist is YOU DO NOT LOOK AT THE TYPEWRITER (or screen). If the computer is trying to be halpful it's going to mess you up something chronic. How many of you can outperform a touch typist?
Cheers,
Posted Jul 28, 2012 16:50 UTC (Sat)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2012 20:07 UTC (Sat)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (15 responses)
(OK, I know you can touch-type while e.g. reading something else... but generally one looks at the screen quite a lot when one is typing.)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 22:26 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (14 responses)
A trained typist does 120wpm (here w actually means 5 characters). So that's 10 characters a second SUSTAINED OUTPUT. How are you going to "context switch" between reading the text you're copying, and the output on paper or screen?
You may look at the screen a lot while typing, but a trained typist looks at what they're copying, not what they've copied. While I'm typing I mostly don't look at the keyboard. Okay, I look at the screen to make sure I haven't made a mistake, but the point of being a trained typist is that you don't make mistakes, so you don't need to check the screen to find them. As such, if the computer throws things up on the screen, it is a REAL nuisance - don't forget I said a trained typist AVERAGES ten characters a second...
Cheers,
Posted Jul 29, 2012 8:20 UTC (Sun)
by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
[Link] (2 responses)
Sometimes when a coworkers asks me something, I look at them and keep typing, but then they think I do it just to show off. Which is true, partly.
I have to admit that I can't type without making mistakes, even though I've had some typing training (long ago). I make little mistakes when typing normal text like this comment, but it gets worse when I have to type a lot of non-alphanumeric characters, like when I'm writing code.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 12:49 UTC (Sun)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
Something else I thought of, too - which is faster, to context-switch and take advantage of the computer's help, or to just carry on typing? If you're a fast typist, the computer "being helpful" is just getting in the way.
I play classical guitar, so I actually class myself as a 6-fingered typist, and typing this comment here it's actually quite obvious. I'm using my left hand "correctly" as a touch-typist and it's making almost no mistakes. My right hand is doing a two-fingered "hunt-n-peck", and making a lot of mistakes. So even if I don't have something to copy, autocomplete can be a real nuisance for me.
So yeah, for many of us auto-complete probably is helpful. But for someone who knows how to type, it's almost certainly faster and easier to turn it off (that is, you can find out how!) and do everything long hand - you'll do it faster than you can context switch.
Cheers,
Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:12 UTC (Sun)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
In the Emacs world, CEDET with auto-complete.el does this, displaying potential tab-completions in faint text beside the cursor after a short delay (when you've obviously stopped typing in the middle of an identifier because you can't remember what it is), and only on hitting, say, the tab key do you get an actual popup menu to select potential matches from.
I've seen IntelliSense systems that lack one or the other of these properties and they are both intolerable to use, either spamming you with stuff you already know, or popping up things and blocking user input when you don't want that.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:09 UTC (Sun)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (10 responses)
Now you might defined a trained touch-typist as a trained touch-typist only if they happen to be doing transcription or other copying at the moment, but I think that's a tiny bit restrictive. It is possible to do things with computer systems other than copying text. :)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 1:58 UTC (Tue)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (9 responses)
Others say they get dizzy if they try to watch.
So, while my eyes may be facing the screen, I'm not really seeing everything that I'm typing. And then there's plain text. Since my web browser routinely inserts 5-10 second pauses while I type, I often find myself looking away and thinking about what I'm trying to say rather than watching the herky-jerky nature of the text box.
I may not be a 120wpm professional secretary, but on timed typing tests I can pull 90-95wpm. I feel that's pretty respectable for an electrical engineer. ;-)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 23:05 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (8 responses)
I am willing to believe that my clinical coordination deficits make me a bad example though. Perhaps most people with typing training typo much less often than me, and can avoid looking at screens for long periods?
Posted Aug 3, 2012 11:48 UTC (Fri)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Aug 3, 2012 12:31 UTC (Fri)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (6 responses)
I guess it depends on the language and the nature of what it is you're writing. For what it's worth, I've typed most of this comment without looking at the text box. :-) It's just easier that way. I'll go back and read it before I hit submit.
As for code, it's more often true that I'm not really "seeing" my edits when I'm restructuring existing code, as to writing new code. I do structure my code visually a rather particular way, though, so that I can do quite a lot with my peripheral vision. So, I more half-see than see much of my code, but I do rely on sight pretty heavily. I'm one of these folks that lines things up religiously. Examples: Code like that I can often whip out while only half-looking at the screen.
Posted Aug 4, 2012 12:37 UTC (Sat)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Aug 4, 2012 16:45 UTC (Sat)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (4 responses)
Actually, I find your compressed whitespace version harder to follow, probably because I'm in the habit of moving my eyes between columns and working fields in groups. I'll read a few field names (as in 2 to 4), then jump to the column of values, then back to the column of field names, etc. That is to say, my visual scanning is roughly like this:
...followed by... All three values are centered together in the highest-res portion of my vision. That doesn't work as well when the second target is more like: If it makes sense to do so, I'll even insert a blank line to make the grouping more obvious, or use different horizontal columns for the values in the groups, if the groups are more logically separate.
If I always scanned field name by field name one at a time, it'd be a problem. But since I tend to bunch fields in logical groups, and tend to treat them as groups, it's actually easier for me to follow when I can see all the field names simultaneously, and then see all the field values simultaneously. My brain can remember field order for a handful of fields at a time, and so treating them in groups goes much faster for me.
Now, in C++, where all those fields would be constructor arguments instead, I'd probably group them differently. In any case, I try to group things to that my innate visual sense of "alike" and "different" help me spot anomalies.
In your compressed version, I have to play "find the value", and I forget what value I'm looking for after awhile. I'm forced to read field-by-field, which is much slower for me. I'm /less/ likely to find unintended discrepancies.
I guess it's the same reason I write "max" with this idiom:
It's easier to see I've hooked everything up properly if I can read down the columns and everything reads in the same order in each column. BTW, on the tabs thing: I've got a strict no-tabs policy in our team, and we set indentations at 4. It's easily enforced so far, though, because there's no more than a few of us at any given time. We're attached to a chip design team, so there's no danger of us suddenly growing our software team...
Posted Aug 5, 2012 7:27 UTC (Sun)
by dirtyepic (guest, #30178)
[Link]
Posted Aug 6, 2012 8:30 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
I've never worked on anything like that (I started out on financial database stuff, then as soon as I started working for a major database vendor I stopped working on databases and started working on stuff closer to the toolchain), and would consider heaps of simple assignments bunched together like that tantamount to lack of sufficient ingenuity: it's usually unnecessary code, since it's normally right next to the declaration anyway. So as long as it's something C would permit in an initializer, I'd probably use one (a designated initializer if necessary). Inside designated initializers, which are certain to contain a group of closely related initializations, I often *do* line things up as you suggest, as long as the amount of introduced whitespace is low -- so I think perhaps there is less difference between our coding styles than was at first visible.
My rule is simple: avoid the boring and evil (one is hard to write: the other is hard to read). What is boring to me is that repeated-over-and-over 'stic->' in your example: what is evil is a spaced-out initializer with a lot of space in which the eye gets lost. (Your solution there would probably be to group them differently so that variables with names of similar lengths were grouped together: mine would generally be to not space them out. I can't really call this a huge difference in style.)
In any case, there is one situation where spacing-out is always called for: same-line comments. *Nobody*, not even weird people who voluntarily use Hungarian notation, puts all their same-line comments right next to the code it describes unless the line is long. And not even in these days of 200-column xterms does anyone write a 200-column same-line comment.
My apologies for not turning this into a dark-curse-ridden my-way-or-/dev/null flamefest. I'm aware that I am below quota on these for this year and will lose my Internet access privileges unless I get some better flame up.
Posted Aug 6, 2012 13:02 UTC (Mon)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (1 responses)
In Pascal, I could have used a "with" block, but C lacks such things. In perl, I use the fat comma in a nicely indented initializer block: The particular code I shared earlier (the STIC code) actually largely pre-dates wide availability of C's designated initializers. With a modern C compiler I would instead consider putting initializers like that block into const structures and use structure assignment to copy the block in in one go. That would both eliminate the boring repeated prefix, and would also likely reduce the overall code footprint since it would replace the discrete scalar assignments with a loop.
Posted Aug 6, 2012 13:58 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jul 29, 2012 3:22 UTC (Sun)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
I never said that making Gnome 3 work better with keyboard only was a bad thing. What I said was that making Gnome 3 work worse with the GUI/mouse was a bad thing. Pointing out to people that they can use the keyboard instead of GUI/mouse is completely beside the point. A distraction, really. As if they couldn't do it in Gnome 2 already.
PS. I would really like to know how your touch typist would read the screen without looking at it. Surely, there must be things of interest on the screen beside what this wonderful typist wrote. :-)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:02 UTC (Sun)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Actually, I don't use Gnome3 at all - don't remember even seeing it! My gentoo make.conf has USE=-gnome in it.
I'm very much "each to their own" so if people like (or hate) Gnome, I don't care. I don't like it, I don't use it, that's my choice FOR ME.
Point is, I picked up comparing keyboard and mouse - I find all too often I'm pushed towards using the mouse, which I hate. The OP I responded to didn't seem to care for the keyboard, which pushed my buttons :-)
As for your PS :-) I'm also a WordPerfect fan. One of its design aims was to "look like a piece of paper" - there's NOTHING on the screen apart from what the typist wrote :-) After all, isn't that the typist's job - to convert what they've been given - audio, hand written notes, someone else's copy - and convert it to text in a computer file? What concerns them is the input - it's just assumed the output will be accurate.
That is one of the reasons MS Word is so dire - it's aimed at the *novice* typist and makes their life easy. No problem with that, except that it is marketed as "for everyone" but it most definitely is NOT a professional tool - all its "help the novice" features seriously impede professional productivity (and can be difficult to disable! :-(
Cheers,
Posted Jul 29, 2012 8:55 UTC (Sun)
by Rehdon (guest, #45440)
[Link]
Actually some of the comments to Otte's post make very reasonable objections, many of which have been uttered since the beginning of the whole Gnome 3 disaster and, to the extent of my knowledge, haven't been answered in a satisfactory way, see f.i.
http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-a...
In any case, the Gnome devs themselves are realizing that they lost quite a good part of the previous Gnome users, see for instance "the bad" in the "Future of Gnome" presentation at the currently ongoing GUADEC (http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-a...).
To pretend that all were well if it wasn't for a small vocal minority of people ranting about the good old times of Gnome 2.x is just hiding your head in the sand.
Rehdon
Posted Jul 28, 2012 0:58 UTC (Sat)
by rleigh (guest, #14622)
[Link] (1 responses)
As an early (pre-1.0) user, I kept using it until 2.x, but with 3.x, it's abundantly clear that the average Linux user is not their target market. Quite who the target is is not particularly clear, but it's certainly not a traditional UNIX desktop. Like many, I've ended up with XFCE, which is more than adequate as a replacement.
What's more annoying than the GNOME issues is how they've also managed to drag down GTK+ with it. That's what their love of "tight integration" gets you. I won't be doing any further GTK+ application development, I'm afraid. And GNOME application development is entirely out of the question--from a developer's POV, the quality of the libraries is dreadful, and they are barely maintained--I still have tested patches sitting in bugzilla after 8 years, even after they had been okayed to apply... which is not so great when you're dependent on issues being fixed (and the libraries not being abandoned on a whim). Result: finding out the hard way that GNOME is not a suitable platform for software development unless you really don't value your sanity (or time).
I'm hoping that Debian will drop this steaming pile as its default desktop for Jessie, in favour of a saner default (i.e. anything else except Unity). If nothing else, it's not particularly fair to make our users suffer when there are far friendlier and more usable alternatives.
Posted Aug 3, 2012 13:48 UTC (Fri)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link]
Let me point out however that xfce depends on GTK too.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 9:02 UTC (Sat)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (6 responses)
I mean, look at the recent Nautilus changes: they removed one of THREE folder view modes, when Windows has 8, and they REMOVED the FOLDER TREE VIEW that has been standard in all file managers in the last 20 years (seriously, this is NOT a joke, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676897).
It's clear that the people in charge are terminal idiots, and probably clinically insane and suffering from some strange sexual fetish for removing features.
So, Red Hat needs to fire all or almost all the GNOME maintainers they employ as soon as possible, before they do further damage, and replace them with people who are intelligent and care about the user/customer.
If any other company is employing any of them, they should of course do the same.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 9:25 UTC (Sat)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link]
They did this insane change while ignoring the negative feedback that everyone else of course provided in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676897
Start firing those two, and maybe the manager who failed to fire them before.
I'm pretty sure other people more familiar with GNOME than me can produce other names of people that need to be made unable to do further harm ASAP.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 9:34 UTC (Sat)
by obrakmann (subscriber, #38108)
[Link] (2 responses)
FWIW, I actually agree that the sidebar tree view is pretty much redundant. The tree view is already built in to the list view. Which is an awesome feature btw. It's exactly what I want when I'm working on a project. I can have a single window showing all files relevant to that project, even if I have them filed away neatly in subdirectories.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 13:16 UTC (Sat)
by pataphysician (guest, #73773)
[Link] (1 responses)
That list view does tree as well, does not make side panel tree redundant, unless you are so narrow minded that you can only see your own work preferences.
List view is very verbose, so you can't see large numbers of files at once. Many people work with Tree side panel, and compact view. List view with tree is most definitely not a substitute for this, unless you think lots of extra paging through crap is good, which seems to be the new design goal of gnome.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 13:36 UTC (Sat)
by obrakmann (subscriber, #38108)
[Link]
I see you're rather new here, let me introduce you to my killfile: *plonk*
Posted Jul 28, 2012 14:11 UTC (Sat)
by augustl (guest, #75060)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 18:11 UTC (Sun)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link]
Imagine going to an airplane pilot and telling them that you are going to take away all the useless dials and instead use one joystick to point the plane and a single slider to tell them how healthy the plane is. Well, my desktop is my cockpit.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 10:36 UTC (Sat)
by wingo (guest, #26929)
[Link] (39 responses)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 11:58 UTC (Sat)
by xan (guest, #58606)
[Link] (37 responses)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 21:57 UTC (Sat)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (36 responses)
And that whole hate is about a pretty unimportant thing. It's not stopping you from getting your work donw, it just makes things a bit harder. But man are people jumping through hoops to express their frustration. I mean, they're not just switching to tame things like XFCE, but they're going to awesomewm and other crack. We must have seriously messed things up in the marketing phase of GNOME 3, I'm pretty sure of that.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 23:16 UTC (Sat)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (35 responses)
If an user ever tells you that he needs a feature, you don't EVER remove it, unless it's absolutely unavoidable; if the feature is not present, try to add it or generalize an existing feature to accomodate the new need.
More in general, a desktop should spend the utmost effort to accomodate all needs of everyone, from the dumb idiot user to Linus Torvalds, and ideally also allow newbies to grow into expert users if they so desire.
This means that it needs to have lots of features, but also rationalize and present them well, and make the default settings work excellently, while being either self-describing or providing unobtrusive but descriptive tooltips, notifications and information texts.
Ideally, it should also try to adapt those default settings to the user, perhaps by asking on first boot if they were used to Windows, GNOME2 or OSX, whether they'd like to have a basic vs advanced UI, whether they like to use the keyboard or prefer clicking on everything, whether they want to use touch, whether they prefer a baroque or a minimalistic appearance, black on white vs white on black, etc. and automatically customize the desktop appropriately.
Instead, apparently, GNOME is designed by some sort of self-referential Red Hat cabal for a single kind of user that probably doesn't even exist or is a strong minority, with no common sense at all, and ignoring any external input.
Just take inspiration from the way Linus runs the Linux kernel project: he makes a kernel that works on 4096 CPU servers as well as embedded systems, never breaks compatibility unless absolutely unavoidable, and tries to make it as easy to use as possible (relative to its non-end-user target) without ever cutting features, except where there's evidence that the feature had no users in the last few years.
The result of this is that pretty much any hardware/system company that isn't Microsoft or Apple wants to use Linux, while the same is not true for end users and GNOME...
Anyway, I think the only fix is to replace the whole leadership, i.e. have Red Hat fire all of them, spend the money on new employees, and strongly instruct them to satisfy the needs of users instead of engaging in mental masturbation and software butchering.
When you see someone removing the tree view from a file manager because it "is really odd and hard to use and inconsistent with every other application" and also "doesn't work well with touch" (seriously, it would be the funniest thing ever if it wasn't a tragedy) and their coworkers, managers (and outside committers, if any are left) not screaming "WTF?", that's when you know the situation is beyond repair.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 2:27 UTC (Sun)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (34 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 3:02 UTC (Sun)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (24 responses)
But a lot of the issues are patterns that have been established for 10-20 years in the GUIs of Windows, GNOME 2, and others, and get dropped with no consideration of the obvious fact that everybody expects them and has muscle memory for them, and that they are often very good ideas.
Things like Ctrl-C/V/X doing copy/paste/cut (since OS/2 I think?), Alt-Tab switching between windows and not between application (since at least Windows 3.1 in 1992), non-global menu bars (since before Windows 3.1 in 1992), having a taskbar on the bottom (since Windows 95 in 1995), launching apps by clicking on bottom left or pressing the Win button (also Windows 95), a clock on bottom right (also Windows 95), the ability to search pressing the Windows key and typing (since Windows Vista in 2006), a tree view in the file manager (since before Windows 3.1 in 1992), a bookmarks bar in the browser (since at least Internet Explorer 4 in 1997) etc.
These are things that any desktop environment that targets people who were previously using Windows MUST have as an option, or you'll make an horrible impression right away.
Furthermore, since GNOME 3 was supposed to be an upgrade, breaking the assumptions that GNOME 2 users made was also utter folly (and you broke Alt-Tab, broke the window list, the clock, the menu, etc.).
Note that most people never experienced an abrupt change in desktop environment on the same device (since they always used Windows, which barely changed in the fundamental UI paradigm since Windows 95), so forcing them to accept them when switching to an obscure platform like Gnome with less than 1% market share is folly, they'll just say "WTF is this shit" and go back to Windows; there's no way most people are going to bother to learn GNOME 3 if takes a lot of effort without spending millions that GNOME doesn't have in creating marketing hype, or tying it to hardware.
So, it's for EXISTING features that you must ask users (and actually there's no need to ask, just don't mess with them...), but you can definitely freely invent new optional stuff, and in fact if you manage some "killer improvement" that's fantastic.
Also, it's obviously OK to enhance existing features, as long as when the users performs some action, he gets a result which is recognizably similar to what the old version did (e.g. he presses Alt-Tab and gets some sort of display of all windows, and pressing Tab again rotates between them).
As an anecdote, personally I tried OSX as a Windows and later Linux user and found it horrible and unusable precisely because it breaks pretty much all of those conventions (including Ctrl+C for copy, they use Command+C instead, seriously!), and doesn't even have options to fix them; it was so terrible that I deleted my OSX VMware virtual machine in disgust rather than keeping it around in case I needed it.
That's an impression you don't want to make.
Conversely, a Windows user starting to use GNOME 2 is usually greeted with an horribly wasteful configuration using 2 horizontal panels (God only knows why distros usually shipped that as the default), but there at least it's very easy to remove the top panel and fix the bottom panel to be taller, and have a Gnome menu on left, window list in middle, and clock on right (although you need dockbarx or similar to emulate the Windows 7 taskbar).
Posted Jul 29, 2012 3:28 UTC (Sun)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (14 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 7:24 UTC (Sun)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 15:58 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 20:29 UTC (Sun)
by krakensden (subscriber, #72039)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 21:24 UTC (Sun)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (9 responses)
I know Gnome 3 caused me to buy a Mac (can't afford downtime when consulting, already burned by KDE). No idea how many others have done the same thing. Anyone have numbers?
Posted Jul 30, 2012 3:43 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
I can understand with GNOME 3 that they were trying to grab for the Brass Ring and get onto the next wave, Ubuntu is trying too as is Win8 (Mac OS X is succeeding). I've played with the latest Fedora and Ubuntu in VMs and I prefer Unity to Gnome Shell.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 15:08 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (7 responses)
Buying a Mac is a pretty drastic response, and IMO is a sellout to everything the Free Software movement stands for.
There are other desktop environments besides the Big 2 and some of them are a pretty painless transition from GNOME 2.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 18:18 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (6 responses)
consoles - ipad/iphone - windows - mac - android - linuxes - gnewsense
I'm just trying to find a stable platform for work while staying as close to open source as I can. I have strong ideals but I can't bill for trying out desktop environments and tracking down display bugs.
When F15 dropped, I had some tight deadlines. After finding Gnome3 unusable on both my work computers (yes, bugs filed), I spent two vacation days trying, xfce, lxde, and E17. All failed for different reasons (often ssh-agent unreliability/conflicts, which we use heavily). Any suggestions on what else to try? KDE4 wasted a lot of time, not feeling real compelled to go back there.
I found myself out of time and out of options... I needed something that would work THAT DAY and the the Mac was a desperation move. It saved my job. I miss FFM but, other than that, I was productive within 1/2 hour of opening the box. Plus, I must say, the 13" Air is a phenomenal form factor. C'mon ultrabooks, catch up!
It's somewhat heartbreaking... I've used Linux for work since 1997 (with some forays into Solaris). When a Linux desktop environment appears that just works reliably and long term (c'mon Cinnamon!), I'll put Linux on this Air. Maybe in two years.
And, if Apple ever pulls a Gnome3, KDE4, or Windows8, I'll switch to something else.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 18:52 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (5 responses)
Interesting continuum. I'm not sure that Windows is more of a sellout than Mac. I'd either reverse that or have them tied.
Any suggestions on what else to try?
I'm surprised XFCE failed for you... it works well for me and I have no issues with ssh-agent.
C'mon ultrabooks, catch up!
My daughter runs Debian on a Toshiba Satellite Z830 and I drool with envy...
Posted Jul 31, 2012 20:28 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (4 responses)
That post ends on a positive note but I never quite got it stable... I don't remember what the problem was, something related to running half XFCE services and half Gnome I'm sure.
Haven't tried .10 yet, maybe ssh-agent is fixed.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 20:36 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (3 responses)
Wow, was I thrashing. You can almost hear the panic in my voice. :)
Posted Aug 1, 2012 0:09 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (2 responses)
Ah, OK. I guess we have different use-cases for desktop environments. I use XFCE to launch my web browser, my mail client, and as many xterms as I can decently run. :) Once those are up, I'm a command-line guy... I hardly use the "desktop" stuff for anything.
Posted Aug 1, 2012 0:26 UTC (Wed)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (1 responses)
I do require working sound, power manager, and network manager though.
Posted Aug 1, 2012 11:20 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link]
Posted Jul 29, 2012 18:42 UTC (Sun)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
The GNOME 2 transition was at least the product of substantial amount of user-interaction testing. There was a corporate body which had decided it needed to replace the desktop of its OS[1]. It spent a good bit of money on the HCI issues, and employing programmers to work on GNOME (e.g. accessibility was another of major interests, IIRC). There were objective reasons to believe that the GNOME 2 changes were good, and hence that it would succeed, regardless of any negative random comments.
GNOME 3 however does not appear to have any commercial feedback loop. It's not even clear there's any systematic, objective HCI testing being done to guide or validate the GNOME 3 changes - if there is, the results aren't being made public (at least some of the GNOME2 HCI testing was, at least in summary form).
It's possible RedHat might one day ship GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell in a supported workstation product. However, given the historical rate of releases of RedHats' supported Linux, that day is likely to be at least 5 years away.
So much of the GNOME 3 debate appears to be based on, at best, hand-waving (I'm being charitable): "GNOME 3 is awful", "Well I like it, nyah!", "All the users have gone to OS-X! That proves {GNOME changes are, change is not} an issue for them!". It would be really good to introduce some objective metrics back into things. Such as objective HCI testing, and, ideally, commercial pressure.
The worst course it to let things drift for 5 years or more, until RedHat ship GNOME 3 in a commercial product. That's a very very very long time in the computer world.
1. It still provided the old desktop alongside GNOME 2, you had a choice at login…
Posted Jul 29, 2012 10:55 UTC (Sun)
by tuna (guest, #44480)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 11:54 UTC (Sun)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (7 responses)
With no easy way of widely preloading into hardware, no massive marketing budget, no tying with other products, a reputation for being uncool and user unfriendly, and desktop being mostly a "solved problem" which no real way to make dramatic improvements, no Linux desktop environment has any chance of gaining users that way.
The only sensible choice is to rely on the "free, open, and not screwing the customer" angle and make really sure to not disappoint the user at first, and THEN show him innovations or improvements, if any are present.
Of course GNOME is doing it totally wrong, since not only they immediately disappoint most users with absurd behavior, but the "open and not screwing with the user" advantage also goes completely out of the window, because while Microsoft and Apple reliably try to screw users for monetary gain where possible, but otherwise attempt to make users happy, the GNOME developers seem to seek to screw users for sadistic pleasure at all times, which is actually worse.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:36 UTC (Sun)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (6 responses)
Did I get that right?
Posted Jul 29, 2012 14:26 UTC (Sun)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
In another part of this thread you considered the issue of why people have a "hate on something" and concluded that... The point being made about keeping features is most likely to be a reflection on the maturity of GNOME 2 and KDE 3 along with both projects' abandonment of that maturity in favour of less mature, experimental, arguably ill-informed approaches to user interface design. In other words, we all had a good thing going and only needed to improve on it, but instead of doing that, whole projects re-oriented themselves towards imitating supposedly intimidating competitors like Windows Vista that turned out to be commercial failures, leaving those Free Software projects significantly disadvantaged. I think you need to resist the temptation to classify criticism as "hate" and to restate criticism in terms of unreasonable demands that might not have been made in the first place.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 14:59 UTC (Sun)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (4 responses)
You provide every feature that any user would want and you keep it that way forever
No, not at all. You don't attempt to provide every feature that any user would want.
However, removing existing features is very bad and should only be done after extremely serious consideration and only if it results in a very substantial code cleanup or other benefit.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 22:54 UTC (Sun)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (3 responses)
And yes I know linux has very recently deleted a large chunk of functionality BUT ... the rationale was very sensible. "Most of this stuff seems to have been broken for quite a while. If nobody can be bothered to fix it, why are we keeping it?".
As someone (same someone?) said "don't delete stuff that users care about" - obviously nobody cares about the stuff that's gone.
Cheers,
Posted Jul 30, 2012 8:26 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 30, 2012 13:19 UTC (Mon)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
Removing support for obsolete hardware is fine; that's a valid reason to remove features.
Removing support for something in a desktop environment "just because" is not a good reason.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 22:41 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jul 29, 2012 14:55 UTC (Sun)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
You can't just ask users what they want and then try to give that to them.
Oh really? I run a commercial software company and that's exactly how we operate.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 21:33 UTC (Sun)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (6 responses)
Not sure about that. Ram your own ideas and preconceptions down your customers' throats and tell me how it goes.
Posted Jul 30, 2012 16:06 UTC (Mon)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jul 30, 2012 16:14 UTC (Mon)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (4 responses)
Obviously the correct thing to do is in between: you can't do everything they ask, and you can't ignore them completely.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 1:05 UTC (Tue)
by louie (guest, #3285)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 2:34 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
I confess, I didn't know it was a Jobs quote until I googled.
On the other hand, very, very few people can pull off what Steve Jobs pulled off. Most people who take the Jobs approach of dictating to their users produce garbage. Jobs just happened to be extremely gifted with a very deep understanding of the shiny things that non-technical users would like. He also understood that most people are happy to trade freedom for shiny things, which enabled the walled garden that Apple is becoming.
Posted Jul 31, 2012 14:11 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (1 responses)
Want to hear how unqualified I am to be talking about UI? I didn't even known that's what the conversation was about. I'm pretty sure Slashdot was talking about DE project structure, leadership, roadmaps, and core functionality. You sure we're only talking UI?
And, while I'd tone down my first reply a little, I stand by what I said. Ignore your customers at your peril.
Posted Aug 5, 2012 22:24 UTC (Sun)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
Posted Aug 2, 2012 15:27 UTC (Thu)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link]
For the rest of us(TM), listening to the wishes of our customers and users is the way to go.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 18:44 UTC (Sat)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2012 11:01 UTC (Sat)
by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
[Link] (23 responses)
I just love GNOME 3. It's the best UI we ever had, and for the first time something that is reaching the quality of OS X UIs and even supercedes them in many ways. After having used GNOME 3 since its release the UI of GNOME2 just looks so incredibly dated, and GNOME 3 such a huge improvement over everything before.
Take that, naysayers, ha!
Posted Jul 28, 2012 11:37 UTC (Sat)
by rleigh (guest, #14622)
[Link] (19 responses)
"GNOME2 just looks so incredibly dated" means nothing--GNOME2 might have been "dated", but it was functional, even if it also lost a lot compared with GNOME1. Even then, using the platform APIs was a shaky proposition. GNOME3 (like Unity) looks nice, but fails to deliver a usable desktop. Both are unintuitive, restrictive, undiscoverable horrors. Both are unusable for actually getting real work done. "reaching the quality of OS X UIs" means limiting ourselves to aping a proprietary platform which while minimalist, is still far more usable than GNOME3, but quite behind the usability of other GUI toolkits. It's not a direction with a future--we should be taking our own direction rather than playing catch-up with something people do not want.
I want a UNIX desktop. GNOME3 does not provide this, and the developers have explictly stated that we are not the target market for GNOME3. Screwing over your entire existing userbase in favour of... some hypothetical new tablet users is boneheaded, and the GNOME developers are reaping precisely what they sowed with this. Developers using the GTK+/GNOME libraries have been banging their heads against the wall for over a decade--I gave up on the GNOME libraries 8 years back--they just aren't suitable for serious application development. Take a look at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166707 for an example of the neglect. Quite how any developer could use the libraries when major deficiencies (with tested patches available) are left unfixed is not clear. GObject-based libraries are a buggy unmaintainable mess, and so it's no surprise that they have few developers when the whole horror could be avoided by using C++. We already have the bindings--it could be made native trivially, and this would make programming it a pleasure rather than an exercise in masochism which results in flaky, poor quality applications.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 13:10 UTC (Sat)
by wlach (subscriber, #23397)
[Link] (18 responses)
Over the years, I've gotten various patches into various GNOME components. In rare cases, just posting in bugzilla gets a response. More often than not, it has involved prodding people on irc and mailing lists and spending some time advocating for my technical solutions (or just sending a reminder that it needs to be looked at). Sometimes I have spent more time doing this than writing my actual patch.
I can't say I haven't been somewhat frustrated by these experiences, but I don't think it's right to ascribe sinister motivations to the core GTK+/GNOME developers. As far as I can tell, they're just really busy people.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 21:07 UTC (Sat)
by rleigh (guest, #14622)
[Link] (17 responses)
In the case of the canvas, the situation was that the "official" libgnomecanvas was not being actively developed, with there being another five or so separate canvas implementations, each slightly different. So the issue here was not lack of manpower, but wasted manpower. If the core canvas had been worked on to fix whatever it was that necessitated each of those forks, there wouldn't have been a problem. Yet eight years on, libgnomecanvas is still unmaintained and is still the default canvas. You still can't properly construct objects and extend it without this unapplied patch! And this is just a single example, there are plenty more for other libraries, but this was just the last one of many which for me, was the straw which broke the proverbial camel's back, since without it, the canvas was unusable. And it still is!
It was (and maybe still is) the case that you were often recommended not to use the official libraries, but separate ones (e.g. egg*). And additionally not to use the C API; which you have to use in practice if you want to integrate properly by creating your objects. What sort of project recommends not to use the primary API?! The language bindings were also perpetually buggy in a myriad subtle different ways. Which ones were the best to use to develop quality applications? In practice, it turned out to be none of them, which is a crying shame. I ended up spending more time working on bugs in GNOME libraries and bindings than I did writing my own application code, which is far, far from ideal, moreso when the patches end up getting ignored and you're blocked again and again from just using the libraries as intended.
The end result is that GNOME, as a software development platform, has gone from being widely used, to being largely unusable. In the 1.x days, there were lots and lots of applications being developed. Many were buggy, but it was exciting, and there was a real buzz working on things. 2.x got more corporate and stifling, and and there were fewer applications (but more polished, and with less features). But none of the key fundamental technical problems have been addressed. It's stagnated even as it looked superficially more polished. Regardless of the "shell" in 3.x, the underlying libraries and technologies used in GNOME are in large part unmaintained, and IMO this is the major problem since without being accessible to outside developers, what is GNOME /for/? The shell on its own is useless--it's only a glorified window manager and application launcher. After abandoning "network objects" and native applications in the form of GOffice, GNOME has definitely lost the focus of primarily being an application development platform, and is instead just shiny bling with little substance, since it's no longer really being used to provide services to applications of any note.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 5:44 UTC (Sun)
by jackb (guest, #41909)
[Link] (1 responses)
I think part of the problem is a mindset left over from the pre-DVCS days. There shouldn't be freestanding patches any more - instead all patches should come from a public git repositories which contain the change. What kind of ecosystem would develop if userspace applications were developed more like the Linux kernel? What if distros stored the bugfixes they develop in public git repositories and pulled from each other as well as upstream? What if getting features to users could just as easily take place by convincing the distro maintainers to pull your changes as it could by getting the change implemented in the "official" repositories?
Posted Jul 29, 2012 21:32 UTC (Sun)
by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
[Link]
Posted Jul 29, 2012 11:29 UTC (Sun)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (14 responses)
Speaking of wasted manpower, libgnomecanvas was inspired by the Tk canvas widget. It would have been perfectly possible to save loads and loads of manpower by improving Tk, which is not at all a bad inter-platform GUI toolkit, and which was around, quite usable, and (unlike Qt at the time) permissively licensed when the GIMP was starting out, rather than coming up with a new GUI toolkit from scratch.
Whatever work it would have taken to fix the shortcomings of Tk is vastly overshadowed by the work it actually took to implement Gtk+, and fix its shortcomings, again and again and again.
The main problem with the current DE landscape in Linux is the tendency to reimplement stuff from scratch instead of fixing or improving existing stuff that is mostly working. Of course it is more fun to reimplement stuff from scratch (especially if, like most programmers, you think you are a lot better at implementing stuff than whoever came up with the original), but in many cases it does indeed lead to a lot of wasted effort.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:30 UTC (Sun)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (13 responses)
So you should be aware that what you're saying is likely completely wrong. Which makes me wonder why you're saying it. Are you just trying to make GTK developers look bad?
Posted Jul 29, 2012 16:06 UTC (Sun)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2012 23:32 UTC (Sun)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (9 responses)
The percentage of programmers who can read other people's code (or even their own from many years ago) and understand it, figure out what it is intending to do, and fix it is rather small. As a result the tenancy of programmers when presented with a malfunctioning piece of software is to re-write it from scratch.
In the more extreme cases, you find people who write great code, but can't debug or optimize it. I've run into a surprising number of such programmers in the commercial world.
I was fortunate in my early classes there was far more emphasis on debugging and understanding other people's code. On one final exam, half of the grade of the final was a one-page printout (no comments) with the statement "this program doesn't work, figure out what it's supposed to do, what's wrong with it, and fix it and explain what it's doing"
As a programmer, I consider it a failure on my part if I can't fix a bug in an existing program and instead have to write a replacement
Posted Jul 30, 2012 13:52 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (8 responses)
One of my first assignments, as a junior programmer, was to take a stack of uncommented FORTRAN code, six inches high, and work out what on earth it was doing!
Like you, I tend to consider clear, well-commented code is rather important - if I can't go back and work out what something is doing, and fix it, then the original guy (maybe even me) didn't do their job properly.
Cheers,
Posted Jul 30, 2012 14:40 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (7 responses)
And the most important thing about the comments is that they need to tell you WHY the code is doing something, not WHAT it's doing (unless you are doing something _really_ tricky, usually as a performance optimization). The what question is usually best answered by reading the code.
Posted Jul 30, 2012 22:00 UTC (Mon)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (6 responses)
It's a silly argument. Yes, much code doesn't need comments if done properly. But there's always a function where when you open it up it's all clear except for a few lines which you look at and think "why is it done like that, surely that could be done simpler". Turns out the simpler version breaks some corner case which isn't obvious. My motto is that if there's a line of code that looks out of place and it takes you more than 5 seconds to work out why, then it's a candidate for a comment.
A nice side effect if you follow this religiously is that lines of code that look weird and have no comment are almost certainly bugs.
(My beginner experience in code reading was figuring out how Zork (the game) encoded its strings, by reading a printed(!) disassembly of the DOS binary.)
Posted Jul 30, 2012 23:37 UTC (Mon)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link]
Sometimes the function names and class names etc are welcoming enough, but often the import of the name doesn't become apparent until I understand the general structure of the code.
So a welcoming comment at the top which outlines what this file of code does and where it fits into the big picture is ... well ... welcoming!
Posted Jul 31, 2012 7:02 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
That sounds like a very good rule to go by. I'm stealing it :-)
> My beginner experience in code reading was figuring out how Zork (the game) encoded its strings, by reading a printed(!) disassembly of the DOS binary
how many of us got our start by wanting to 'modify' some game? (this is a good reason for games to have local or single-user modes so that people can 'cheat' without hurting others who don't want to)
Posted Jul 31, 2012 22:59 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (3 responses)
I've tried coding the l-k way, with just 'why' comments and nothing else, and invariably I find I come back to the code in a few months and it's a real struggle to figure out what the hell it's doing, because of the lack of any sort of narrative comments: I'm left reverse-engineering my own work or trying to recall six-months-gone trains of thought, and neither seem like a good use of time. The GNU Project's toolchain software is my personal idea of the sort of comment density that makes sense: frequent expansive block comments (not little 'do this' scribbles) and if a page doesn't have a comment on it you're probably doing something wrong. LLVM is well-commented, too.
Probably as a consequence of this, I find many parts of the core kernel's small-scale structure comprehensible only with noticeable effort, despite having written C for nearly twenty years now and fairly frequently dreaming in it. The small-scale structure of GCC is relatively easy to grasp by comparison, despite its much greater complexity, because it's so much better commented (its large-scale interactions are something else entirely). I suspect the l-k comment policies could only survive for a system like a kernel where most of the thing is relatively pedestrian and the complex stuff, like mm, is limited enough in scope that a few people can devote most of their time to it and never get rusty. Something where the *whole thing* is complex, like a modern compiler, can probably not survive with such harsh anti-comment policies.
(For reference: drivers/md/md.c has about a third to a fifth of the density of comments I would consider acceptable for my own work. raid5.c is much better, though I note that the heavily-commented bits seem to be the buggy bits, and investigation of the git history suggests that these comments mostly got added as bugs appeared. Personally I prefer to write the comments *before* their absence causes misapprehension-induced bugs, but that's just me. ;) )
Now perhaps I just have a particularly crap memory, and nobody else needs this sort of comment density, but I suspect the real cause is that most people just don't like writing comments, whether they are a good thing or not, any more than they like writing documentation. I suspect also that hackers for whom English is not their first language might *actually* find the C easier than comments in a language not their own: it's hard for me to judge this as an English monoglot. Maybe we need multilingual autotranslated comments!
Posted Jul 31, 2012 23:06 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
When they don't, and people rely on the comments rather than the code, it's worse than having no comments.
Posted Aug 1, 2012 9:15 UTC (Wed)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 1, 2012 14:14 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Jul 30, 2012 17:42 UTC (Mon)
by rleigh (guest, #14622)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't think that there was ever a good reason to fork six or more implementations from the original libgnomecanvas. It resulted in a plethora of buggy and incomplete libraries, none of which were ever supported or completed properly, including the "official" one. This is the major technical failing of GNOME: a failure to provide sane set of usable and stable APIs and tools.
Regards,
Posted Jul 30, 2012 19:56 UTC (Mon)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
Instead of starting GTK+ in the first place, it would have been perfectly feasible to write The GIMP based on Tk, possibly by implementing an »editable bitmapped graphics« widget or by augmenting the existing (object-based) canvas widget to include editable bitmap layers. The Tk canvas could already embed other widgets, so one would have been able to get that functionality (along with the rest of the toolkit) for free.
That approach would also have had the side benefit of making the »bitmapped graphics« extensions available to other Tk-based programs.
Posted Jul 28, 2012 13:26 UTC (Sat)
by dcg (subscriber, #9198)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 28, 2012 19:36 UTC (Sat)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link] (1 responses)
The point wasn't ever how many dislike Gnome 3 (or KDE 4, or XFCE, or...). As long as there are those who like it (there sure are, the people developing them aren't doing it for mercenary reasons; plus many others), the environments will march on. BTW, count me in the "I like Gnome 3 better than Gnome 2" camp.
Posted Jul 29, 2012 10:27 UTC (Sun)
by Rehdon (guest, #45440)
[Link]
Rehdon
Posted Jul 30, 2012 4:27 UTC (Mon)
by gmatht (guest, #58961)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 30, 2012 5:35 UTC (Mon)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link]
Also, 30% not liking seems rather high: would a poll asking "Do you like the Linux kernel?" or "Do you like Fedora?" get anywhere near 30% negative votes on a Fedora forum?
Posted Jul 31, 2012 1:31 UTC (Tue)
by Trelane (subscriber, #56877)
[Link]
Posted Jul 31, 2012 10:47 UTC (Tue)
by njd27 (subscriber, #5770)
[Link] (1 responses)
http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2012/07/31/the-future-of-gn... Posted Aug 2, 2012 20:56 UTC (Thu)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 2, 2012 23:33 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 2, 2012 23:55 UTC (Thu)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link]
IMHO - it's fairly insane to imped usability for the person-in-chair-with-keyboard-and-mouse segment for the maybe someday gnome3 on touch-table market. The UI paradigms should be different so such radially different input method and form factors (and indeed the UI is different for the table devices currently on the market).
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Wol
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a good first step: admit that you have a problem
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
Personally, I only look at the people praising GNOME 3 and ignore all the rest. Self selection bias and so on. I'll wait for another article to show that I was right!
</black humour>
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
a good first step: admit that you have a problem
1. they make it the default, and
2. the old option is discontinued.
And the implication that GNOME developers do NOT care much of their user's needs. That's OK if you are doing something for yourself, but when you contribute to a project that so many people rely on, you need a different attitude.
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I know that, for instance, the gimp people are working on GTK3 support, but they also have to contend with really bad bugs and lack of support for Windows and OSX.
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No... I'm talking specifically about corporate investment in the development of the UI layer. This has nothing to do with "use"
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You should have left out the "couldn't care less about gnome" part. Makes you look like a KDE zealot. :pOtte: staring into the abyss
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Until Linux distributions finally break themselves and are willing to make a changes necessary to be a good desktop OS no Linux DE is ever going to progress beyond were it is at now.
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XFCE
XFCE
XFCE
XFCE
XFCE
XFCE
XFCE
Since you are apparently using Debian, just select the "GNOME Classic" session in your display manager and you're done. No configuration required.
XFCE
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First of, E17 first needed a modern cleanly designed toolkit.
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Comments : according to ohloh, 12% evas, 37% for eina, 17% for gtk+, 16% for gstreamer.
Loadable modules : seriously do you want me to do a comparison ? So 34 libraries if you install EFL libraries and 64 modules. All of our module can be built statically (but in that case you may have to pay a higher application startup cost). If I just look at pixbuf 19 modules, gtk+ 37, gstreamer 235, ...
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I hope you take note that the two contenders you pointed out completely eschew the traditional Linux distribution method and are intensely for-profit projects.
I still think it is entirely and 100% possible for a true Linux desktop to thrive and attract user and developer attention on a scale that will surpass Apple desktop by a factor of two or ythree.
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I just wish a leading Linux DE would start thinking long term like this. Changing everything all at once is never OK.
Microsoft is about to learn this the hard way itself...
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Wol
Better (faster, easier to remember, whatever) keybinds? Good. More clicks per operation for mousers: Bad. Very bad indeed. (And I say this as a keyboard fan.)
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The whole point of being a touch typist is YOU DO NOT LOOK AT THE TYPEWRITER (or screen)
Touch typists don't look at the screen? Huh?
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Wol
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Wol
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If you're a fast typist, the computer "being helpful" is just getting in the way.
That's why IntelliSense-class 'helpful' things should obey two rules: operate on a customizable delay, and don't pop up things that change the semantics of input unless explicitly requested.
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Can't see how. I can imagine prose writers typing along by heart; the legendary Asimov comes to mind -- and his prodigious output is witness. But for code I don't know anyone who can write by heart. As has been said above, structure and context are crucial. Perhaps a more textual language might do the trick, and bring along miraculous productivity improvements... I think I prefer a more concise language, even at the cost of indentation marks.
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/* Calculate bit_r 8-bit bit-reverse table */
for (i = 0; i < 256; i++)
{
uint_32 bit_r = i;
bit_r = ((bit_r & 0xAA) >> 1) | ((bit_r & 0x55) << 1);
bit_r = ((bit_r & 0xCC) >> 2) | ((bit_r & 0x33) << 2);
bit_r = ((bit_r & 0xF0) >> 4) | ((bit_r & 0x0F) << 4);
stic_bit [i] = i << 8;
stic_bit_r[i] = bit_r << 8;
}
...
stic->stic_cr.read = stic_ctrl_rd;
stic->stic_cr.write = stic_ctrl_wr;
stic->stic_cr.peek = stic_ctrl_peek;
stic->stic_cr.poke = stic_ctrl_poke;
stic->stic_cr.tick = stic_tick;
stic->stic_cr.reset = stic_reset;
stic->stic_cr.dtor = stic_dtor;
stic->stic_cr.min_tick = 57; /* to get started. stic_tick will reset. */
stic->stic_cr.max_tick = 57;
stic->stic_cr.addr_base = 0x00000000;
stic->stic_cr.addr_mask = 0x0000FFFF;
stic->stic_cr.parent = (void*) stic;
stic->phase = 0;
stic->next_phase = 57;
stic->fifo_ptr = 0;
stic->stic_accessible = 0;
stic->gmem_accessible = 0;
if (stic->req_bus)
{
stic->req_bus->intak = ~0ULL;
stic->req_bus->intrq = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq_until = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq_until = 0;
stic->req_bus->next_busrq = ~0ULL;
stic->req_bus->next_intrq = ~0ULL;
}
Yep. And code like that is great if the data you are entering is really columnar. It's awful for e.g. the very assignments you show it used for, becaue it's actually quite hard for the eye to track from, say, one of those = 0's back to the thing you're assigning to -- you have to track across a lot of whitespace without deviating horizontally, which the eye is notably bad at. In this specific case it doesn't matter because the assignments are all either of 0, or at the end of a block, or of a name similar to the name of the variable, or there happens not to be much whitespace, but can you see how bad this close variant is? (reordering things to provide an example with enough horizontal whitespace to make my point, I know this makes no sense as code anymore):
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stic->phase = 0;
stic->next_phase = 57;
stic->fifo_ptr = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq_until = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq_until = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq = 0;
stic->stic_accessible = 14;
stic->gmem_accessible = 0;
It's actually quite hard to see which variable that 57 or 14 are assigned to: they're lost in a sea of horizontal whitespace, while the columnar format makes it appear that all those 0s and 14s and 57s are related to each other, when they are not at all. Isn't this clearer?
stic->phase = 0;
stic->next_phase = 57;
stic->fifo_ptr = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq_until = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq_until = 0;
stic->req_bus->intrq = 0;
stic->stic_accessible = 14;
stic->gmem_accessible = 0;
Another problem with lining things up like you suggest is that it encourages people to use tabs to line things up, rather than restricting themselves to using tabs solely in the left margin as sole indentation mechanism. And I don't need to tell you why that is an awful idea unless you have a way of enforcing that absolutely everyone on the project uses the same tab size. (I prefer to do as GNU is increasingly doing and simply ban tabs outside of literal strings. It's too easy for a thoughtless co-worker with the wrong tab size to turn a codebase into mush with a single save when tabs are in wide use. With spaces, this is impossible, even if you do lose the easy 'change the indentation by changing the tab size' trick. This trick rarely works in practice because most people don't have the discipline to use tabs and only tabs as indentation mechanism, with no padding out with spaces, and to use them nowhere else, ever.)
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stic->phase
stic->next_phase
stic->fifo_ptr
= 0;
= 57;
= 0;
= 0;
XXXXX = 57;
XXX = 0;
if (max < val)
max = val;
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My rule is simple: avoid the boring and evil (one is hard to write: the other is hard to read). What is boring to me is that repeated-over-and-over 'stic->' in your example: what is evil is a spaced-out initializer with a lot of space in which the eye gets lost.
my %hash =
(
foo => 0,
bar => 42,
baz => 1,
quux => 1234,
gronk => 0
);
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Wol
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http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-a...
http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-a...
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Let us hope that xfce becomes the next default desktop for Debian; it seems to be an appropriate choice. Xfce has doubled the number of users according to popcon since Gnome3 was launched.
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Fire those idiots
Fire those idiots
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Fire those idiots
What a good way to express it. In my humble experience it is very, very hard to put in everything that users want to do, and still make it simple to use. All UI elements must be exactly there when users need them, and disappear when they don't. How do you do it? You iterate the interface as many times as needed, you don't remove things. Despite the unnecessary inflammatory tone of slashdot, he or she is right.
Fire those idiots
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
Switching to Apple
Switching to Apple
Relative sellout-ness
Relative sellout-ness
Relative sellout-ness
Relative sellout-ness
Relative sellout-ness
Relative sellout-ness
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
You provide every feature that any user would want and you keep it that way forever. Unless of course, you're adding something that's new and innovative. Or you're targeting lazy/cheap/ignorant/uncaring users.
such nastiness.
We must have seriously messed things up in the marketing phase of GNOME 3, I'm pretty sure of that.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
Wol
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
The discussion is over once someone stoops to lmgtfy.such nastiness.
Jobs quote
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
such nastiness.
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GNOME platform libraries
GNOME platform libraries
You still can't properly construct objects and extend it without this unapplied patch!
GNOME platform libraries
A software tested on Ubuntu could completely break on Fedora because the respective distribution maintainers applied two different patch to fix the same bug in two different way.
GNOME platform libraries
In the case of the canvas, the situation was that the "official" libgnomecanvas was not being actively developed, with there being another five or so separate canvas implementations, each slightly different. So the issue here was not lack of manpower, but wasted manpower.
GNOME platform libraries
GNOME platform libraries
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Wol
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
"If the code and the comments disagree, both are wrong."
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
Programmers are trained to write code, not read it.
GNOME platform libraries
Roger
GNOME platform libraries
I think that in the case of GTK+ being a separate toolkit, there was a legitimate reason to implement a "native" canvas, or at the very least have a native API to a canvas. It also allowed embedding widgets on the canvas, so needed to be native to some degree.
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A Gnome 3 Poll.
A Gnome 3 Poll.
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touch stats?
touch stats?
touch stats?
