Just like Eugenia yesterday, I also upgraded my laptop’s Ubuntu Feisty installation to Gutsy a few days ago. The upgrade process went completely awry, though, so I was forced to do a fresh install. Not a bad thing, as it gave me the opportunity to take a look at Ubuntu’s soon-to-be-released Gutsy Gibbon with GNOME 2.20This new release of course comes bundled with the latest GNOME release (2.20), and hence, many of the changes are courtesy not of Ubuntu, but of the GNOME team. And even though I often criticise the GNOME team for not having a plan for the future, that does not mean I do not like GNOME the way it is. And with the recent 2.20 release, they have done a really good job at introducing more polish into the desktop environment.
The first thing I like about the new GNOME release is the stunning new version of Clearlooks. Even though Ubuntu does not use it by default (it of course defaults to Human), it does include it in the default installation. You can find it in the brand-new and much-improved Appearances dialog, and dear god (lower-case ‘g’), does it look good. Couple the new Clearlooks with Compiz Fusion (now included by default in Ubuntu, and configurable via that same Appearances dialog), and you are looking at a desktop which easily rivals both Vista and OSX when it comes to bling. The Ubuntu guys have been very conservative with their settings, so users will not be overwhelmed by pointless effects. If you want to add more bling, or want more control, be sure to do a sudo apt-get install compiz-config-settings-manager. A recommended plugin (and now a personal must for yours truly) is the Expo plugin. This will show all sides of your desktop cube in a row, with a nice subtle reflection, allowing you to switch between them, and drag applications from one desktop to another.
One thing I still miss (or is hidden too well) in Compiz/virtual desktop is the ability to militantly confine applications and their child windows to certain desktops. I use four virtual desktops, with the first reserved for instant messaging (Pidgin, XChat), the second one for browsing and current work (Firefox, OpenOffice, Gedit). The third virtual desktop is solely reserved for a full-screen instance of Evolution, and the last virtual desktop is a dumping ground for applications that either do not need my constant attention (music players) or stuff that I may need in the future, but are not needed right now. I want to have the ability to tell Pidgin that if someone sends me an instant message, that its window should appear on the IM desktop, and not on any other desktop I might have selected (I detest tabbed user interfaces, so that trick does not work). I realise that this is not a barrier-to-entry kind of feature, but still, I am sure more of you would like something like this. Sure, Devil’s Pie can do all this, but you can hardly call that fantastic little application easy to set up.
Eugenia already suggested it (in fact, we discussed it before she wrote the article) but I would really like to see Ubuntu default to the Bitstream Vera fonts, with sub-pixel hinting set to medium. This presents the crispest fonts one could ask for. In fact, up until not too long ago, I needed to do a lot of manual fixage and editage to get Linux fonts to look this good – now it is just a few clicks away.
GNOME 2.20 also finally fixes a very, very, old bug: the buttons in the taskbar applet would change size at will, dependent on how many windows you had open, the names of the windows, the position of Jupiter compared to Venus, and so on. This bug has now finally been fixed, and the buttons will not resize at will anymore.
Ubuntu (or GNOME) still needs to dive into the process of consolidating the amount of preferences panels. Both /administration as well as /preferences are literally overflowing with entries, and I would really love to have some of them combined. For instance, there are three panels strictly related to networking, and things like Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Mouse can be combined into one panel called ‘Keyboard & Mice’ (coincidentally, that is how OS X does it). Speaking of the Mouse panel, many, many, many thanks to the Ubuntu guys for creating a Touchpad tab in the mouse panel. This was one of my biggest pet hates about using Linux (I hate touchpad tapping, it drives me absolutely nuts), and seeing it fixed so late in the development process (it only got added in the past few weeks) was a really positive and welcome surprise. The changes you make in this tab are instant, so you do not need to restart X – something you were forced to do before, since the only way I knew of to disable tapping was to add MaxTapMove=0 to your xorg.conf.
In addition, there is now an X configuration applet in Ubuntu. If there is one thing many people have been begging for ever since Ubuntu began its march to the top, it is this one. Apart from configuring drivers for your video card and monitor, you can also manage dual-screen properties from this panel.
Evolution has gotten some serious love too. Not only does it look a whole lot more appealing (I am not really sure what they have done to the interface, but it looks a lot cleaner), it also received some cool new features. My absolute favourite must be that Evolution ‘knows’ when you are supposed to include an attachment (by looking at keywords) and then warns you before sending if you forget to attach it. My friends will thank the Evolution guys.
The progress Evolution has made still does not negate the fact that I believe Evolution is overkill for many users. In addition, a spam email message brought Evolution down to a grinding halt, and it took me quite some time to get Evolution to work properly after that, since Evolution insisted on re-opening with that same email selected. Some protection system against this sort of thing (which never happens on Mail.app, BeAM, or Windows Mail) would be very welcome – this is not the first time this has happened in Evolution.
The new Ubuntu also comes with Pidgin 2.2.0. Pidgin has come such a long way since its Gaim days, it is not even funny. The client is finally growing up real fast, but there are still some things that I miss – most importantly, Pidgin’s MSN support is not always what it should be. The biggest annoyance is that you cannot seem to change your server-side MSN alias, so whatever you enter client-side, it will not update the server side, and therefore not show up in your contacts’ user lists. MSN has a 100% market share in my country (I kid you not), so this is actually a big deal for me.
There are some things that I miss in Ubuntu/GNOME. Even though it obviously comes with The GIMP, I really also want a simple MS Paint like paint program to come pre-installed. For this review, for instance, I am taking various screenshots, and it would have been much nicer to just have a simple paint program at my disposal to quickly edit these shots, without having to resort to The GIMP. You know, you do not hammer in a 1.2mm by 3cm nail with a sledgehammer.
Another personal pet peeve is the complete inability to edit toolbars. I have an almost unhealthy urge to remove any toolbar button I do not use, just to make my interface cleaner. I do not need copy/cut/paste/find/print/etc. buttons in every window’s toolbar, simply because I use keyboard shortcuts (or the menubar) for these actions. It would be nice to be able to right click on any toolbar and remove buttons that way (similar to Firefox). However, seeing it took me two years of whining to add a Metacity option in gconf to minimise-windows-upon-doubleclick, I imagine something like this may take closer to 20 years to add to GNOME. Toolbars are overrated anyway.
Overall, however, I am simply extremely impressed by the new GNOME and the upcoming Ubuntu release. You can see the developers have put a lot of effort into not just cramming in new features, but also making sure that existing features work and look better. This is the first time that I truly feel as if I am using a product when using Ubuntu, instead of a collective effort to make desktop Linux suck less. The gaps that need to be filled are getting smaller each release, and this particular release closed some important gaps already.
If there ever is going to be a ‘year of the desktop’ for Linux, the 2007/2008 season definitely is a strong contender.
Same for me, gnome is now completly unusable. I think I’m also forced to do a fresh install …
Thats rather strange; you may wish to lodge a bug report with Ubuntu because that will cause some major issues for those who are trying to do upgrades rather than a clean install.
The official upgrade instructions are on http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/tribe5 namely
Upgrading from Feisty
If you upgrade from feisty, please make sure that you have update-manager 0.59.23 from feisty-updates installed. Then run “update-manager -d”
Worked fine on my PPC Powerbook, with one minor reported bug in that I had to manually remove evms package. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evms/+bug/115616
But that’s what alphas are for finding out.
Note however there is a bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/141060 which can cause problems in getting update-manager to see the new test release.
If you can’t stand that sort of bug, wait until the official release. But my thanks to everyone who helps the testing!
Edited 2007-09-24 09:41
Yes, and this why I suggested that a bug to be filed against the issue – yes, alpha/beta there to find out those bugs, but if you don’t report those bugs, they won’t get fixed.
I never slammed Ubuntu or the beta, I slammed those who do find bugs, whine on osnews, then wonder why those bugs aren’t fixed when the ‘gold master’ is shipped.
I’ve been hearing the tired old “this is the year of desktop Linux” since revolutionary Mandrake Linux 9.0 was released way back in 2003! I’ve used Ubuntu Linux off an on for about a year and a half and the one thing that has always struck me about the Ubuntu community is that everyone there seems to live in a perpetual state of waiting for the next big release. Once it drops, then the nitpicking begins and then it’s “wait for the next release…” ad nauseum! There’s no denying that Ubuntu isa fantastic Linux OS for personal desktops (for servers, I prefer pure Debian, but that’s another topic.) The Ubuntu community needs to perhaps slow down and analyze each release and work out needed improvements before dropping a release only to move immediately to the next one. That’s why there are niggling little bugs that have persisted since Hoary!
Hehe
Welcome to the growing crowd of “this is the year of desktop Linux” sayers.
I am saying this phrase now since 2001, because that was the time, when I first was able to use a complete Linux Desktop (Mandriva 7 I think), without having to boot into Windows for anything I wanted to do (except gaming, and that was not critical for me).
Since then, every year someone in the press anounces a year of desktop Linux.
Well, THE year of the Desktop Linux will be, when at most PC-stores you can select either Windows or Linux or both (!) for your PC, without one of the two being in any way “undermarketed”.
On the other hand, MY year of Desktop Linux has already happened. And somebody else’s year of Desktop Linux might never happen.
But it is a good sign that Dell started, giving feedback to the community, about what needs to be improved to get from the backrow of the shelfs to the front.
I was considering making the jump, but not yet then hehe
Wait until the stable release then.
Can someone comment on whether the new changes to the kernel and gnome (polling) have resulted in battery savings? We have now had two reviews on laptops with no mention of this. Thanks.
My laptop’s battery is dead (not even 1.5yrs old) so can’t help you on this one.
My battery is dead also, I am considering a new dell, thus my curiosity. Perhaps Eugenia will weigh in.
Well, when I first ran Gutsy, it had the same battery life as Windows Vista (translate, not very good at all) then I put Debian Sid back on there for a while and it was much better. But now It’s working much better and I have quite long lasting battery.
Also as a side note, the battery monitor actually works properly now for my Logitech Wireless Mouse as well. If it’s low on juice, it pops up (which was working before) but now it actually tells me it’s charging and when it’s fully charged. Very nice addition
So for anyone who was wondering about battery life, or just saving power in general, the future looks bright:
http://www.lesswatts.org/results/mobile/
Did you try this yet ? You could have a better battery life.
But since we are in this subject, the support for cpu_freq scalling was almost like giving birth to an elephant. Is it better ?
All you have to do on a debian based system for cpu-freq to work is run ‘dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets’ or on Ubuntu ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets’ then it’ll explain why it’s not available in the first place, and give you a warning about it running SUID, then once you enable it, just add the CPU Frequency Scaling applet to your panel and it works. At least it does for both my AMD64 Desktop and my Intel Centrino Laptop. I did notice that Fedora 7 has this enabled by default.
CPU frequency scaling is handled by default. We don’t support manual overriding out of the box because:
a) it’s difficult to do in a way that doesn’t allow denial of service, and
b) the kernel generally knows better than you, especially now that the ondemand governor is well tuned.
The only machines where it won’t work automatically are Celerons (which don’t support voltage scaling, so there’s little point in frequency scaling) and some older Pentium 4s (which have similar issues, with the addition of extra latency to make the experience even worse). If you’re having problems with another chip, please do file a bug.
Yeah, that’s basically what I said
Fedora 7 has manual override on by default, under Debian and Ubuntu you have to reconfigure the gnome-applets to set SUID for manual override and it does give the appropriate warning.
Sometimes I like to use it when I’m watching a movie on my laptop while using my battery so that it doesn’t use it all up, since usually to make smooth DVD playback, the CPU tries to jack itself up to maximum, even though the 798Mhz that it runs as the slowest speed works. Though I have found that under Windows XP, there was a slower speed that the CPU could clock itself too, and I had it working under Linux as well at one point, but I had to modify some files which I can’t recall at the moment.
Width all the respect – last time I heard something like that it was in April. (about ‘revolutionary’ 7.04)
In my opinion “year od Linux desktop” will come when there will be no copies of XP in shops anymore.
:-/
as soon as possible: this will next year, from MS point of view
What exactly defines “The year of the LINUX Desktop”
If it means increased market share then the last 5 years have qualified.
It will NEVER wipe out Windows so stop dreaming.
As far as LINUX being ready for the desktop, I believe it is there, I think it was more or less there with Edgy. Everything since has just been frosting.
I saw that OO.org can read .docx. Is this a feature of OO.org 2.3 or Ubuntu’s one ?
Edited 2007-09-23 15:09
I think OO.o has incorporated the efforts by this project http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
thx, so .docx import should be availible on windows oo.org 2.3 too ?!
I thought the XLS based slolution was rejected by sun, to be replaced by an c++ implementation
Edited 2007-09-24 20:21
Editable toolbar are coming to Gnome, some applications, like Eye Of Gnome, already have this feature:
http://live.gnome.org/EyeOfGnome/RoadMap
I beleive that the lib haven’t been included yet into gtk so it has to be implemented app by app for now, but it should reach every apps when it’s included in gtk (I guess).
It’s a shame the transparency in the GNOME panels isn’t ‘real’ transparency, it’s merely a faded imprint of whats behind the panel set as it’s background.
I sure wish Avant Window Navigator was half stable.
Edited 2007-09-23 15:57
I’m a GNOME god.
No, seriously: right-click on an unused area of any panel, Properties, Background tab, select “solid colour”, mess with the “style” slider.
Enjoy.
Edited 2007-09-23 15:59 UTC
Always wanted to do that, thanks for the tip Thom.
It’s a shame the transparency in the GNOME panels isn’t ‘real’ transparency, it’s merely a faded imprint of whats behind the panel set as it’s background.
If you are using a compositing manager (like Thom is in the review) the gnome-panel transparency is “real” in that it is hardware accelerated.
Gnome 2.20’s foundation is gtk 2.12. This version has some serious improvements for composite awareness and using it to it’s fullest capacity.
Where can i find that background?
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Ubuntu+Grass+%28Logo…
perfect, thanks!
I really like the fonts setup according to the mac4lin setup. Looks great on Feisty with a LCD 19″ monitor.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin
readme:http://pastebin.com/m2247f046
If it was an Ubuntu upgrade that went bad, why the fsck are you blaming it on Debian in your blog? (“For the first time ever, Debian has let me down. A dist-upgrade on my laptop went tits up“).
You credit Ubuntu for the good stuff but blame the bad on Debian.. wtf. Ubuntu is its own distro. If they screwed up a dist-upgrade that’s their problem.
If anyone wonders why some Debian devs resent Ubuntu
Isn’t it interesting how when Ubuntu’s upgrade option goes “awry” it wasn’t such a “bad thing”? If this were a Windows or Mac review it would have got a slating.
Whilst it’s nice to have silver linings, a buggy upgrade installation will not help us towards the year of Linux of desktop, so please remember to be objective when required (and if necessary, critical) – just because it’s a Linux distribution doesn’t mean expectations should be lowered. Of course, in many other aspects of the distro, it looks like things are really coming on
You misunderstood me. I am not saying the messed up upgrade is good – I’m saying that the fact that I can now do a fresh install is good. That is something completely different. A fresh install is much better from a reviewer’s perspective, as it creates a much more objective environment.
Edited 2007-09-23 16:53 UTC
The one time I tried a dist-upgrade, I corruped my system so massively (like ls and pwd wouldn’t find all the files I could see in nautilus) that I was forced to wipe the drive and install Xubuntu 6.06 from scratch.
IIRC Ubuntu actually reccomended that people not do the dist upgrade to get from 6.06 to 6.11, there were so many corrupted installs.
What does this say about the upcomming Gutsy Gibbon release?
That you should follow the recommended procedure of using update-manager instead of dist-upgrade? lol
It’s somewhat ridiculous to do so, if the usual way should be an upgrade without new install in Linux. You know like the professionals, not Windows *g*
I’ve done my fair share of fresh installs and I’ll say that as far as they go, Ubuntu is pretty good because most things work out of the box, or are rapidly becoming a 5 minute job to get everything working, then it’s just a matter of installing the applications you want, and for most people they’re installed by default.
Of course the bad thing is, that Ubuntu is not as good at upgrades as it should/could be. I’ll explain why….
With Debian, you have everything supported as a whole. Either a package is maintained and updated as the stable release comes to a close, or it simply gets obsoleted and taken out of the repositories, assuming that it doesn’t work with new libs, etc.
Ubuntu on the other hand does things differently. They have main, restricted, multiverse and universe. The first two are supported and if you simply stick to those, then you’ll not have any upgrade problems (well more than likely) but when you start getting to the non-supported packages, a lot of them aren’t maintained as well as they should be. So they can possibly screw things up. A good example of a non-maintained package is Azureus. They changed the packaging dramatically enough from the Debian Azureus that it’s still stuck at 2.5.0.0, and Debian has had 2.5.0.4 for a long time. I ended up grabbing the sources from Debian and having to change a lot of files in the debian folder to get it to work (mostly because in Debian the swt library is named slightly different than the one in Ubuntu. Who thought that was a good idea?)
Granted the packaging philosophies is why Debian takes a long time to release a “stable” version and Ubuntu can do it every 6 months.
I’m not sure why people had issues between Dapper and Edgy, but I never had such an issue that I can recall. Then again I think when Etch was released, I switched to that, though I’m now running Gutsy Gibbon and I’m liking it so far!
I am quite angry that Ubuntu has screwed up some upgrades though, since that’s supposed to be one of the strongest attributes of Apt in the first place. It screwed up going from Edgy to Feisty on a friend’s PC, I had to re-install on that one. Though in it’s defense, that’s mostly due to it being (at the time) a new Core 2 Duo system and Grub itself would not work, I had to configure Lilo to boot Linux on it. But Feisty worked out of the box when I installed it on there.
I’ve never messed up an upgrade myself though (he did that one himself) but that’s because instead of using update-manager or dist-upgrade, I take synaptic and first update the base system, like the kernel, and libc6, then reboot and pray. If that works, then I start with the user space things.
As far as anything going awry with this though, I think it’s mostly Gnome and if you just remove your current settings and go back to default Gnome (the .gnome, .gnome2, .gconf, .gconfd directories) then it should work ok. That’s what I had to do.
The ease of upgrade of Debian systems is much more down to the packages than apt itself. Apt tends to be better at working out solutions for dependency conflicts than some other high-level package managers, but you’d need an AI to guarantee the correct solution. We do our best to test upgrades using packages provided within the distribution and add hints to the upgrade manager to deal with some awkward corner cases, but if you’ve installed packages from elsewhere then it can become very difficult to make this all work properly.
Using the update manager is always the recommended way of handling upgrades, though. One thing it ought to ensure is that you’ve got a functional desktop setup after the update. If that’s not happening then it’s a bug, and we’d be very interested in finding the details in order to make sure nobody else hits it.
The ease of upgrade of Debian systems is much more down to the packages than apt itself.
That’s what I meant in my post. It seems that the packages in Debian usually are more updated and work better with each other. It does have the update manager in it now, but I don’t really use it. Ubuntu’s main and restricted work very well together, but sometimes the Universe and Multiverse packages become out of date and don’t work in newer releases of the distribution.
Most people with a clue put /home in its own partition so that you keep all your data and configuration and can have the luxury of doing a fresh install with the assurance that all your settings and files are preserved across installations.
Edited 2007-09-23 21:46
Most people, in this case don’t include your average user, or your average distro maker because the default is not to put them in their own partition but to put them all on one partition. Most users just run through the defaults. You can’t really blame them for that.
Apoclypse,
I agree. I actually think it’s a bug not to default to having /home in its own partition. I even filed such a bug report with Ubuntu a while back.
I am not blaming the average user for this as, by definition, they don’t have the time or interest to understand partitioning schemes. It is the job of the distributor to inform and educate the user, which can be done with a simple tooltip in the partitioning tool.
Mandrake since time immemorial has put /home in its own partition, which made my initial tribulations with Linux much easier as I had the certainty and assurance of keeping my data safe and being able to reinstall at will.
So, I am not disagreeing with you. I think we, more technically inclined users, owe to our friends and family to help them understand some of these issues, such as partitioning. Eventually, though, I hope to see all desktop distributions default to a separate /home partition.
You obviously didn’t get it.
1. It was the author’s fault, he didn’t follow instructions for upgrading and payed the price. If you did something stupid like that on windows you’d end up with broken windows as well. If anything, Thom deserves a beating for FUD spreading.
2. This is a BETA. When Vista BETA had bugs people didn’t cry sh*t about it either.
So, next time, please do your research.
Can someone tell me a real use for an application like MS Paint? (Except for letting young kids toy around with it). MS Paint is the last thing I’d miss in an operating system (as long as I have more mature applications like gimp or inkscape)
The gnome screenshot utility is should be enough for 98% of the case (screenshot of whole desktop/a single window)…
Edited 2007-09-23 17:29
Like I said. You don’t use a sledgehammer to hammer in a 1.2mm by 3cm nail. GIMP is absolute overkill for very minor image editing needs – stuff like resizing, cropping, blurring out email addresses, and so on.
In fact, to this day, I haven’t found nor a Linux GNOME, nor an OSX application similar to Pain.NET. A simple yet powerful image editor for those smaller tasks that do not need a Photoshop-grade application.
Edited 2007-09-23 17:53 UTC
What about KolourPaint?
Oh noes, that means there’s more applications in the KDE menu. Of course that causes bloat/fluff/slowness because there’s an extra application that apparently people want actually? what a surprise… Gimp isn’t even all that useful these days anymore anyways, at least for HDR photography.
So Thom, how long has gaim supported resizing, cropping, and blurring? Is this a new plugin? </sarcasm>
Edit:
If you like paint.NET so much, why not use it on Linux?
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/May-15-1.html
Edited 2007-09-23 17:53
I always use gthumb for resizing, cropping, etc, but don’t know about blurring email addresses.
“application similar to Pain.NET”
Nice Freudian slip.
Try kolourpaint. I don’t know Paint.NET, but kolourpaint is just MS Paint on stereoids. And it received quite some work in KDE 4 as well. Imho we now have a decent range of applications -> Kolourpaint for the basics, Showfoto (from digikam) for photo editing, and Krita for real painting. And Gimp, of course, for those who hate themselves.
MS Paint no, it’s too limited, no but Paint.Net definitedly!
I dislike very much Gimp weird interface (I’ve never used Photoshop so this is not related) whereas I found Paint.Net relatively easy to learn (for my limited usage).
And if a MS Paint-like application is needed there’s always GNU Paint from the add/remove programs tool.
Edited 2007-09-24 01:26
Gimp is horrible, Inkscape way over the top as well. If I just want to rescale & crop a picture, with some effects, Showfoto does better. If I want to change a few more things, I often use Kolourpaint (the paint thing Thom believes doesn’t exist on linux. typical.). I use Krita for the complex stuff, and only start Gimp if I need a good laugh.
Sigh. Reading is very difficult, isn’t it? I said that I never *found* a decent one. I did not say: “it does not exist”.
Reading is difficult, I know.
Sorry. Well, at least you can now be a happy happy guy – the app you where seeking for exists. Enjoy.
and only start Gimp if I need a good laugh.
If you think that your bashing to GTK+ applications will makes us switch to Krita or KDE think again, it really sucks that a good project like KDE is infected with trolls like you.
Edited 2007-09-24 16:57
Nah, you shouldn’t. And I’m not really bashing, merely stating the obvious. Or would you say Gimp is the pinnacle of usability? Promoting it as a Photoshop alternative is a good way to scare ppl away from linux. Thom is right when he asks for an easy to use paint app. It took me some time to find one, but I did find it in Kolourpaint. And as I wrote, I occasionally use Krita.
Anyway, sorry, I do get carried away sometimes. I should not transfer real-life frustrations on G-apps…
I realise that this is not a barrier-to-entry kind of feature, but still, I am sure more of you would like something like this. Sure, Devil’s Pie can do all this, but you can hardly call that fantastic little application easy to set up.
Thom, you are using compiz-fusion. Why use devilspie when the “place” plugin exists? Under ccsm it is “Place Windows”. It supports having some applications always on the same viewport or location.
I’m not using Devil’s Pie. I was just looking for a way to do what I described I wanted to do. Didn’t know the place plugin took care of these matters. Thanks.
There are so many plugins, it’s sometimes hard to see the trees through the forest.
Update: Damn, that place plugin is impossible to use. What a mess to configure.
What I want is this: right click application entry in the menu or in the taskbar, and just select: confine to workspace x. That’s it.
Edited 2007-09-23 17:59 UTC
If you use KWin as windowdecorator in Compiz, does that use the KWin functionality or only the look? If it uses the functionality, you have all this kind of stuff in there by using rmb on window -> special window settings. There you can set anything you want on an application.
And having all that in a submenu – what, are you insane?
(this is one of the things I’m happy KWin gets compositing – Compiz is still behind on the REAL windowmanagment. Of course, a Gnome user is used to Metacity, so they actually have MORE with compiz).
Don’t get me started on that one. Metacity is a downright MESS. I’m so happy with Compiz/Emerald.
Well, I wouldn’t say mess, as far as I can tell – it’s just a bit too basic for my taste.
You say you detest tabbed interfaces, yet want to consolidate preference panels? This seems an odd contradiction.
That’s not a contradiction at all. Preference panels are just that – preference panels, and not applications. Tabs in preference panels have absolutely nothing to do with those in applications.
I detest tabs in applications because to me, each window represents a different workflow, and therefore, I want to manipulate it as one. When I’m instant messaging, I may have, say, 4 different conversations. Some of those are highly active and important – I want those to be bigger. Other ones might only get like one msg each 30 minutes – those can be small. Even other ones, like the conversations I have with Eugenia, are little blurbs of activity for like 5 minutes, then nothing for 3 hours, and then another blurb of activity. Each of those different cases requires its own window size.
On top of that, I want *one* place to switch between workflows – the taskbar. When you use tabs, more often than not you end up with multiple places to switch workflows (the tab bar in Firefox, the tab bar in Pidgin, the taskbar itself, and so on).
Utter, utter, hell. Tabbed applications are the seed of the devil for someone like me. The only thing I hate more in graphical user interfaces are vertical text labels.
Imagine my horror when I see a vertially text labeled… Tab.
Edited 2007-09-23 18:31 UTC
Funny. To me, every application should use tabs. Office applications the most – I heard OO.org is moving towards that and I await that day. There’s nothing I hate more than having N windows opened for the same application. I even would love a Fluxbox-like “tabbing” of different applications being implemented on all window managers…
By the way, I think this just demonstrates that the possibility of personalization must be king, instead of relying on the “the dumbest fits all” mentality of some usability experts (yes, GNOME folks, that’s for you, sorry).
Yes i like Gnome but only with compiz-fusion,kiba-dock,devil-spie and mac4lin. You can’t say compiz-fusion and co don’t have enough options to set.
The KDE window manager has excellent support for window placement.
You can set application and window defaults including size, location, virtual desktop, etc.
The list of possible settings include position, size, desktop, shading, placement, keep above/below, and more.
In addition you can set any of these in any combination of apply initially, remember, force, etc.
As always Thom I couldnt agree more with your take on UI, especially your comments on bitstream fonts and the importance of configurable toolbars. Thanks for doing what you do
I love the effort that is being put into Gnome and Ubuntu, but it is unusual to hear this outbursts of praise for features that were or have been in KDE for years.
*Editable toolbars: Check
*Checking for missing attachments before sending email: Check.
*A dialog to configure and change your monitors resolution: check.
*A way to disable tapping on trackpads: check
*Changing of MSN alias/name serverside in Kopete: check
*Simple Snapshot and painting applications: kolourpaint Ksnapshot,(You can use Krita if you need a more powerful painting application).
The fact that many reviewers,not just Tom or ELQ, mention these things as novelties shows both the lack of depth in may of these reviews, the fact that Ubuntu has become defacto Linux for many people who have not had a chance or bothered to try a different desktop environment and/or the fact that many people have somewhat irrationally made a choice to stay with one desktop and never bothered to check back again whether that choice is justified.
But even if you stay in one desktop environment, why make it sound like these applications simply don’t exist. I use GRAMPS (a genealogy application), GIMP, Inkscape and many other “Gnome” apps all the time and they enrich the linux desktop and are just fine.
This “allergy” that people seem to feel about running applications from both KDE and Gnome is a bit irrational, to the point that many applications are being rewritten k3b, Amarok, simply so that they can use the same toolkit. What a colossal waste of time and what a shame to see the free software community suffering from NIH (not invented here) syndrome.
What are you on about? I’ve most likely used more Linux distributions than you can count, and have actively used so many desktop environments it’s not even funny anymore. I regularly use KDE, in case you want to know, and know it inside-out.
The new things in I mentioned ARE NEW TO GNOME/UBUNTU. When I’m (p)reviewing a product, should I say, at every new feature: “the following products already include this feature”, followed by a list?
Come on now, your rant was way out of line, and makes no sense at all. On top of that, if you had bothered to look beyond your own nose, you could’ve seen this article was not a review at all.
I’m sorry, but simply DETEST mixing KDE and GNOME applications. I have my reasons for that, but even if I didn’t – it’s my choice, and that’s enough reason alone.
Edited 2007-09-23 21:47 UTC
The new things in I mentioned ARE NEW TO GNOME/UBUNTU. When I’m (p)reviewing a product, should I say, at every new feature: “the following products already include this feature”, followed by a list?
That’s not an acceptable excuse Thom and you know that. We’re not talking about hundreds of window managers or different distros here, but about the TWO biggest desktop environments available out there for *nix desktops. Praise GNOME for features that have been available on its biggest competitor for years and not even mentioning it?!?!? You call this non-biased journalism??? Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot!
I really don’t see what is so hard in saying something like “Ubuntu got feature A which is a good thing although this same feature has been present in KDE-based distros for quite sometime” or something along these lines.
Not that I particularly missed anything as I am pretty aware of these features and have been enjoying them for years and Ubuntu reviews on this website is like preaching to the choir anyway, but you guys could at least pretend that you’re doing a fair and balanced review…
I’m sorry, but simply DETEST mixing KDE and GNOME applications. I have my reasons for that, but even if I didn’t – it’s my choice, and that’s enough reason alone.
I would say “Your loss, pal!” here. I don’t like to mix toolkits as well but I wouldn’t settle down with an inferior application just because the better one happens to be coded with the “other toolkit”. I mean seriously… Why use any GTK-based music player instead of Amarok, which is hands down the best music player currently available? Why use a Qt vector drawing application when currently there is nothing that beats Inkscape? That reasoning is beyond me…
I’m sorry I stepped on your KDE heart. I haven’t seen Aaron Seigo complain here yet, and he’s kind of my benchmark on these issues
.
Yeah, and then I’d be labeled as a KDE fanboy. You haven’t been on the internet long, have you?
“I would say “Your loss, pal!” here. I don’t like to mix toolkits as well but I wouldn’t settle down with an inferior application just because the better one happens to be coded with the “other toolkit”. I mean seriously… Why use any GTK-based music player instead of Amarok, which is hands down the best music player currently available? Why use a Qt vector drawing application when currently there is nothing that beats Inkscape? That reasoning is beyond me…”
Agreed. I think all this fuzz about toolkit wars is total rubbish. Windows Media Player looks totally different from all the other Windows apps and somehow people are fine with that. The latest Office looks totally different from other Windows apps and people are fine with that. Ditto for MSN Messenger. Heck, most commercial Windows apps these days use some kind of custom control or are in some way skinnable, and I don’t see people complaining about that.
The difference in looks between GTK and QT is not that great, yet people make a huge deal about this.
It might be total rubbish to you – but it is probably also total rubbish to you that I want my cups’ ears in my kitchen cabinets to all point in the same direction. Sure, total rubbish to you, but still, I find it important to give my kitchen a clean and tidy feel.
Why do people ALWAYS insist in pointing fingers whenever a person points out a flaw in product xyz? It is COMPLETELY irrelevant.
And in case you want to know: I have complained numerous times about the graphical inconsistency in OSX and Windows. I thoroughly HATE it.
Way to be superficial. Qt applications do not only look different, they behave different. They have a different layout, different behaviour, differently organised menus, different types of buttons, different types of just about anything.
It’s great that you have no problems running them side-by-side. But please don’t make it seem as if people who in fact do NOT like it, and have clear reasons for that, are idiots.
I quite agree. My eyes always glaze over when I see people trying to justify the bad design of one application by comparing it to another application with similar design flaws and saying “look, they do it too, it mustn’t be all that bad”. Windows suffers greatly from UI inconsistencies, OSX less so, but this should be a call for other OSes to get their shit together and make something better. Linux would be much better off if it used a unified toolkit or API for applications, rather than the fragmented mish-mash of GTK, QT and “other” that currently exists. The libraries that drive the UI should conform to consistent standards so that applications will behave and look the same across the board, regardless of which implementation of the standard is used or how the end user configures their UI.
Some people are happy jumbling a pile of different things together; others (like me) have aesthetic sensibilities that value form of equal importance as function.
Why do people ALWAYS insist in pointing fingers whenever a person points out a flaw in product xyz? It is COMPLETELY irrelevant.
And in case you want to know: I have complained numerous times about the graphical inconsistency in OSX and Windows. I thoroughly HATE it.
People are entirely justified in pointing this out. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but on platforms where you have a wide variety of software, shipped with the OS, from the same vendor or from lots of ISVs, different applications tend to diverge in their relative looks and behaviour. This isn’t always a sign that people want to deliberately make things inconsistent, just that different applications do different things and people use different toolkits for the jobs they want to do. You either get a good choice of applications and somewhat diverging integration, or you get far less applications and better integration. The world has spoke – they want applications.
Now, if you’d rather fanny about and have everything written in the same inferior toolkit, minimising the functionality and overall usability of an application, that’s entirely up to you.
Way to be superficial. Qt applications do not only look different, they behave different.
Or should that be GTK applications look and behave differently?
Hell, GTK and Gnome applications can’t even look and behave consistently amongst each other let alone with everyone else. Some of Gnome’s control panel applets still don’t use the abominable instant-apply standard, but you would think they would if they shared a common, stable architecture between them. Running around everything to make it HIG compliant is just not what a modern development desktop is about.
Talking about getting editable toolbars in 2007 is just plain ridiculous, and any Windows or even Mac developer worth his or her salt is going to laugh at you in disbelief. You implement it once in your underlying toolkit or library, and voila, everyone gets exactly the same, consistent thing. It’s that simple, or at least it should be.
They have a different layout, different behaviour, differently organised menus, different types of buttons, different types of just about anything.
I’d go and ask the Gnome people why they decided to go off on a Mac trip and make everything inconsistent with Windows, KDE and every Unix desktop that had gone before. There was zero evidence to back that decision up, other than it’s the way that the Mac does things.
It’s great that you have no problems running them side-by-side.
I don’t have problems largely at all. The KDE people came up with a Freedesktop project called QtGTK that allows GTK applications run within KDE to use the same colours and theme, and to an extent, inherit the look and feel of the KDE environment as well (file dialogues etc.) Using Eclipse, Inkscape and VMware Console isn’t quite so painful at all now, but in order to maximise the applications you have available on your platform you can’t expect perfection.
But please don’t make it seem as if people who in fact do NOT like it, and have clear reasons for that, are idiots.
Listen, if you want to have a good bitch about this, and since this article is about Gnome on Ubuntu, why don’t you ask some of the Gnome developers what they’re doing to adequately solve this problem and what they’re doing to integrate Freedesktop software like QtGTK to help with this? There’s quite a bit in there for doing the reverse to get KDE and Qt applications integrated into a GTK environment.
Do not bitch at everybody else if the desktop you’re using isn’t doing anything to help and ease this problem in a sane manner, other than to lamely rewrite applications in a ten year old, inferior toolkit that Windows, Mac and other developers quite frankly wouldn’t touch with a ten foot bargepole.
blah blah blah usual rant by segedunum blah blah blah
Tell us the truth, admit that the GNOME developers assaulted your home and gang-raped your dogs, your cats and all your dolls. You keep bashing GNOME everywhere and anytime, there’s no other logical explanation for such a pathological behavior: you (and superstoned, who unbelievably has yet to comment on this news) are ALWAYS bashing GNOME, GNOME developers, GNOME users, GNOME applications, GNOME toolkits, GNOME libraries, GNOME programming languages, GNOME bindings, GNOME window manager, GNOME everything!
It’s disturbing and a bit scary.
Edited 2007-09-24 13:57
Dude… Shill!
I couldn’t say it better.
Tell us the truth, admit that the GNOME developers assaulted your home and gang-raped your dogs, your cats and all your dolls. You keep bashing GNOME everywhere and anytime, there’s no other logical explanation for such a pathological behavior……… Yada, yada, yada, someone said something against Gnome, how dare they, it’s terrible, I don’t want to read it! Arghhhhhhh!
I recommend reading and digesting it sweetheart. Your comment (if you can call it that) is as far off-topic as it’s possible to get because it addresses……..nothing regarding what I wrote.
If you have difficulties doing that then I’m afraid that’s just not my problem, is it? It’s more a reflection on your own mental problems accepting criticism on anything that might be dear to your little heart.
If you want to respond to what’s actually in there in a sensible and adult manner I’m all ears, but I’m not holding my breath.
Yada, yada, yada, someone said something against Gnome, how dare they, it’s terrible, I don’t want to read it! Arghhhhhhh!
You missed the problem. It’s not “someone said something against Gnome”, it’s “you (segedunum) wrote some 1600 Gnome bashing comments.” (projection based on the quick sampling of your last 50 comments)
Well, you still failed to address his points. I thought that the distinction between the message and the messanger was known to be a basis of any good discussion *shrug*
Minimising what? I can do whatever I need to do on GNOME, and I can do whatever I need to do on KDE. You make it seem as if I’m in some way ‘pro-GNOME’ just because I do not wish to mingle Gtk+ applications with Qt applications. That’s kind of a weird deduction there.
It’s fine you hate Gtk+/GNOME (be honest about it for once), but please don;t try to shove me in a pro-GNOME corner. There’s enough to not like about GNOME/Gtk+.
In a Gtk+ environment, Qt applications stand out like an eyesore. In a Qt environment, Gtk+ applications stand out like an eyesore.
Well, this approach hasn’t been very ineffective. Basically all major Linux distributions default to GNOME right now, so I’m not entirely sure where this “zero evidence” comes from. Het heeft hen geen windeieren gelegd, so to speak.
For the millionth time: I don’t have a need for Qt applications in a Gtk+ environment! Jesus Christ, how many times do I have to repeat this? Gtk+ applications serve my needs JUST FINE. What’s up with this militant approach of trying to shove applications down my throat that I don’t want, nor need!
A big, deep, and long sigh. THERE IS NO PROBLEM. I’m content with the Gtk+ applications as they are, and when I’m in a Gtk+ environment, I haven’t a need a Qt application could fulfill. Is that so hard to understand?
Minimising what? I can do whatever I need to do on GNOME, and I can do whatever I need to do on KDE.
What’s the problem then?
By minimising what I mean is that when you have a lot of people writing lots of applications that you can run then they tend to be less integrated with different toolkits and look somewhat different. That’s what you get with diversity to an extent. When you have less applications, or you decide to stupidly rewrite what’s already there, then you end up with less applications and functionality because you’re cutting yourself off from what’s out there. Not a good idea.
It’s fine you hate Gtk+/GNOME (be honest about it for once)
Oh, here we go…………
I don’t like it for the very reasons I’ve stated, speaking primarily as a developer (which have knock-on effects for users). I’m not making them up and I’m not dumbing them down for political correctness. If people want to get upset then that’s entirely up to them. If people want to debate, then great!
but please don;t try to shove me in a pro-GNOME corner.
It’s always a dead give-away when people start talking about pro or anti anything ;-).
Well, this approach hasn’t been very ineffective. Basically all major Linux distributions default to GNOME…
This is an argument usually wheeled out when people have nothing left to say ;-).
You know, people have been telling me this for the last seven years, and it doesn’t seem to have made one iota of difference to the people out there who are actually using Linux desktops or one iota of difference to the relative popularity or usage of Gnome. Go figure that one out. This ‘default’ stuff has been done to death for years and years – and people are still trying to re-state it ;-).
But, we’re off the beaten track there, as we always are over these things…….
…so I’m not entirely sure where this “zero evidence” comes from.
The ‘zero evidence’ bit came about because there was no evidence at all as to why they suddenly went and did this with respect to consistency with Windows and the rest of the Linux/Unix world, apart from the feeling that Mac OS is right about everything. The right/left button ordering is merely a preference Apple made. Nothing more.
The whole ‘Oh everybody defaults to Gnome so it’s OK!’ argument is just the sort of ignorance I’d expect, because people run applications under WINE (Paint.Net for instance), they also have a lot of older Motif applications that they run and they may actually have Qt applications running, because apparently, it’s not so bad at this cross-platform thing. Apparently people run quite a few custom applications and things of that nature. I suppose they should all rewrite them for GTK to get consistency then………………….?
You make it seem as if I’m in some way ‘pro-GNOME’ just because I do not wish to mingle Gtk+ applications with Qt applications. That’s kind of a weird deduction there.
You’re the one wading in and moaning about different toolkits, different looks, different behaviour etc.
In a Gtk+ environment, Qt applications stand out like an eyesore.
Whose fault is that then? I thought this didn’t affect you anyway?
In a Qt environment, Gtk+ applications stand out like an eyesore.
What is a ‘Qt environment’?
If you’re running KDE, that effect is minimised because people actually put some considerate work into this and accepted that people might like to run GTK applications. Not perfect, but OK.
For the millionth time: I don’t have a need for Qt applications in a Gtk+ environment! Jesus Christ, how many times do I have to repeat this?
W-h-a-t a-r-e y-o-u t-a-l-k-i-n-g a-b-o-u-t t-h-e-n? If everything is perfect and OK with the world, and everything is GTK for you, where’s the problem? Everything should be consistent, right?
This discussion came about because someone said that toolkits shouldn’t matter – and they shouldn’t. You might get some differences here and there, but as long as there is some effort on integration and as long as the developer feels that they’re using the right tool for the application then that benefits the end user. Moaning about ‘differences’ is neither here nor there because ultimately, a desktop environment has to attract and support applications that people want. Those who can do that, get ahead ;-).
Gtk+ applications serve my needs JUST FINE.
Go and use them then. For everyone else they have different applications that they use and they have some people who are fortunately willing to put some effort into integrating them and making them look OK in that environment. The net effect of that is that that environment gets more applications, and then more users ;-).
What’s up with this militant approach of trying to shove applications down my throat that I don’t want, nor need!
No one is. Amarok is a pretty good media player that apparently quite a few people use, and it seems popular. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If the developers of your desktop that you use don’t want to put effort into application integration then that’s entirely up to them.
THERE IS NO PROBLEM. I’m content with the Gtk+ applications as they are, and when I’m in a Gtk+ environment, I haven’t a need a Qt application could fulfill.
Hmmmmmmmm. Are you sure?
“Even though it obviously comes with The GIMP, I really also want a simple MS Paint like paint program to come pre-installed.”
Kolourpaint:
http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/
If you don’t want to use that because your own desktop environment doesn’t have that functionality, it’s written in some foreign toolkit or the developers of your desktop don’t want to do any integration work then that’s fine. Go without.
“Another personal pet peeve is the complete inability to edit toolbars.”
Then use a desktop environment with a proper set of underlying infrastructure and you won’t have that problem. Like I said, in 2007 it’s a bit daft that anyone is talking about that.
You’re either able to attract all sorts of applications to your platform in the long-run, and that ultimately means more toolkits, embracing diversity and change, or you hit the bricks.
That’s a long post, segedendum, but one which is based on two faulty assumptions.
1) I do not limit myself to GNOME. I run KDE too. I just don’t mingle them.
2) I’m not advocating GNOME. Really, I don’t. Your points are directed at someone who is advocating GNOME over KDE.
Edited 2007-09-24 17:55 UTC
That’s a long post, segedendum
Oh, the “It’s such a long post I just can’t understand what you wrote!” reply ;-). It warranted a decent explanation, which really took an awful lot of your arguments through the wash cycle.
You could have picked some selected highlights, but no.
…but one which is based on two faulty assumptions.
I’d love to know how you arrive at them, but of course, it’s a whole lot easier just to shout zealot.
1) I do not limit myself to GNOME. I run KDE too. I just don’t mingle them.
I never made that assumption anywhere, nor is anything I wrote based on it. This is the usual “I run KDE as well!” comment.
Many people do mix environments and applications, because many people like to keep the applications that suit them best or give them the best functionality at any given time. Most stick to the applications provided by their desktop environment, but as I’d stated, some people use different applications on Unix and Linux desktops, some run under WINE or Motif. It’s a fact of life. I do not believe that everyone should be running KDE applications or something and nothing else.
Of course, you’re free to tell the users of those applications that they look crap under the desktop you use…………
2) I’m not advocating GNOME. Really, I don’t.
I’m not interested whether you are are not, which is why I skirted around it in my previous reply. I’m debating the points that have been discussed in this thread, so feel free not to take the discussion somewhere where I never wanted it to go.
Your points are directed at someone who is advocating GNOME over KDE.
And we come back to the ‘Gnome and KDE’ thing again. Another dead give-away ;-). I’m not talking about Gnome and KDE as a couple of bulls with their horns locked. I’m talking about what’s actually there and what’s actually been and being done. If that comes off to you as a ‘Gnome and KDE’ thing then there’s something wrong somewhere only you know about.
You may come off as advocating one over the other, but those are neither here nor there concerning the arguments I made about different toolkits, integration of different applications and what people actually want. If one does something better than the other then, well, that’s the way it is.
Edited 2007-09-24 18:23
Dude, are your writing a novel? Geez these are long. Very entertaining though.
If you run for example kradio or k3b under gnome and you have an aqua metacity and gtk theme it looks like shit.
Not that i care as long as everything works. But still.
However i would apppreciate it if osnews.com authors would save their personal opinions for themselves or their pet weblogs. Bad journalism.
You mean we shouldn’t write reviews, previews, and editorials anymore? Because they’re bad journalism? Better call every newsoutlet you ever heard of. They all do this, you see.
I actually meant you should keep your personal opinion to yourself and try to stay objective. This way thereis more room for articles written by people who have clearly more talent than you and me.
Better call every newsoutlet you ever heard of. They all do this, you see.
http://www.phoronix.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.reuters.com/
http://www.volkskrant.nl/
don't
Amarok the best music player out there? Well, it might be for you, and that’s great. I absolutely hate Amarok, it’s the seed of the devil for me, UI wise. It has vertically labeled text tabs for crying out loud! Any application who has those ought to be removed from the internet by law.
Seriously. It’s great you like Amarok, but please don’t make sweeping generalisations about it being the best there is – because it isn’t.
“You haven’t been on the internet long, have you?” — Thom Holwerda
I don’t know… I don’t think that Exaile developers think that Amarok’s UI is that bad considering that Exaile is an almost exact copy of Amarok – including that vertical toolbars, mind you! – but made with GTK for GNOME desktops and since it has become somewhat popular among GNOME users lately, I’d be inclined to believe that Amarok UI is in fact just fine. Remember the old saying? “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.
Seriously. You might not like Amarok because of something on its UI – or because it is made with Qt – but you can’t deny that it is the most full featured music player out there because it is.
That’s the whole problem right there. I don’t WANT features in my music player – I want it to play music, darn it! The Amarok guys are so feature and information hungry that they managed to make a music player difficult to use! That’s a feat, I’ll give them that.
Mind, though, that WMP and iTunes suffer from the exact same problem. In order to keep interest in iTunes going, for instance, Apple has been continiously force-feeding us compeltely useless updates to a music player that used to be so-so – now it’s an absolute dog.
Wrote about this very issue on my blog this morning, by the way.
http://cogscanthink.blogsome.com/2007/09/24/746/
Well then may I suggest you to use mpg123, moc and mp3blaster?
I agree with you that these applications’ developers should restrict themselves to not add useless things to their media players, but I have yet to find something not useful in Amarok.
Thom, about that vertical tab paranoia that you have. Would you say that this
http://banshee-project.org/images/c/c9/0_11_0_daap.png
would be somehow better in this context? The sidebar-type thingy is ALWAYS there staring at your face, whereas the Amarok sidebar can be removed with just a mouse-click. Then it’s GONE! Gone, with all the devastating and horrifying context information. And the only remnant will be a small vertically-tabbed bar on the side. The rest would be devoted to the play list.
Or is this
http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/screenshots/rhythmbox-main….
very good usability-wise? This is IMO the case of stuffing unneccesary items on top of each other. All in the spirit of the oh-so-great Gnome HIG.
Now you have announced that a full-featured music player is not what you need. But why on earth do you have to use all the complexity (and bitch about it) in i.e. Amarok? Stuff your albums into the playlist, hide the sidebar and play away. Or use something like Kscd or the Gnome equivalent and play CDs. Or use mplayer.
Apparently you’d prefer a music player that has only one big “PLAY” button to start playing music but unfortunately in most cases this kind of scenario is impossible.
About my claim that got you so excited, yes I really think that “Amarok is just about the cleanest as it gets UI wise”. Of course, there is SOME room for improvement, but generally the Amarok team has done just fine. The fact that you cannot take anyone, who doesn’t share your deep hate against vertical tab bars, seriously is a sign of the limitations of your firmware, not a valid point to diss Amarok.
I’d say that the Amarok UI is even intuitive (no matter what the almighty HIG might define of being intuitive). When the sidebar is displayed, then the UI is divided into the playlist part and the sidebar part. Compare that with Rythmbox where you have several separated lists for whatever.
And the sidebar and the playlist area are easily distinguished from each other.
And all that I might want to do with a music player/manager is accessible with a simple mouse click. Context information, collection management, external device management etc. And when I don’t need them they’re out of the way.
And so I conclude that “Amarok is just about the cleanest as it gets UI wise”. Yes it’s not a one-button-does-it-all application but it is not meant to be one and it cannot be one because the task it’s meant for is not suitable for that.
Also, please note that until you realise that you cannot belittle other opinions just because they don’t believe in Allah or that vertical tabs are evil then your opinions bear almost no credibility.
Edited 2007-09-24 16:20
You can completely remove the sidebar in Banshee. Just click the drag handle, and drag it to a close. Gone. I like Banshee. Simple, to the point interface.
That’s not very desirable. I don’t like the weird two-on-top-of-one designs (you see it in more music players). This particular type of view is better when the three boxes are all side-by-side, similar to how the Finder in OS X does it.
Right. I could just as well say, the fact you do not see that vertical tabs are evil is a sign of the limitations of your firmware, not a valid point to praise Amarok.
A music player should not need such a divide – especially not one that bring about tabs and scrollbars. Whenever scrollbars and tabs appear, it generally means you want to display more information than a window can handle – and hence, you need to cut down on the amount of information you want to share.
And I don’t care about Rythmbox.
That’s all nice, but it is besides the point. Amarok does a whole lot, and as I’ve said before, if that is your cup of tea, than great. However, that does not negate the fact that Amarok tries to show too much information all at once, and its GUI suffers from it. Any music player that needs to resort to tabs-in-tabs, vertical tabs, and scrollbars-in-window-sections needs to re-think its UI.
Feature-wise, what beats Amarok on Linux? Not trolling, it’s a serious question: if there’s a better alternative, I want to know it.
Songbird
I don’t know about “better”, but there are some music collection organisers and players of similar functionality:
Listen:
http://www.listen-project.org/
Songbird:
http://www.songbirdnest.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)
Banshee:
http://banshee-project.org/index.php/Main_Page
Exaile:
http://www.exaile.org/
JuK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuK
http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/juk.html
Rhythmbox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythmbox
http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/
Edited 2007-09-24 13:07
Those are nice, but not as complete as Amarok. But if you want a more basic music player, JuK is an excellent choice, and so is Listen.
VLC
cyclops, stop modding me down
“Feature-wise, what beats Amarok on Linux? Not trolling, it’s a serious question: if there’s a better alternative, I want to know it.
”
mocplayer!
Not sure why I got modded down for recommending modplayer
I absolutely hate Amarok, it’s the seed of the devil for me, UI wise. It has vertically labeled text tabs for crying out loud! Any application who has those ought to be removed from the internet by law.
Oh, woe is you! Vertical tabs are not particularly great and shouldn’t be used per se, but they’re not particularly unusable either. You have icons there as well, so you’re not completely relying on text. I don’t read the text in the tabs at all, but I found out what they did pretty quickly. Personally, I think there are bigger problems out there, such as Kontact’s insistence on using nothing but horizontal arrow key keyboard navigation in a vertical listbox, or Gnome’s ridiculous insistence on drinking the instant-apply anti-freeze and giving me no way of reversing what I’ve done in a dialogue other than me remembering where things were. Duhhhh, that’s why I use computers.
They need to organise what they present better, but it’s not the end of the world as some people desperately want to make out that it is – for reasons that are best known to them ;-).
Seriously. It’s great you like Amarok, but please don’t make sweeping generalisations about it being the best there is – because it isn’t.
That’s great for you, but the facts are that people can sort their music and their playlists well in Amarok, they’re able to get lyrics and use other services, they’re able to get artist information, see tracks by the same artist in their collection, do album art…….
People can do all that, and it all actually works more often than not without a .Net traceback in sight! What do I want then? Have something without vertical text in tabs, or have something that works most of the time? Hmmmmm, it’s a tricky one……..
Give us a laugh and tell us what media player you think is the best.
The problems arise from WHAT they are presenting. They want to present so much information, that the UI simply cannot cope with it – forcing them to do weird things like vertical tabs and tabs inside tabs with scrollarrows on them.
Still, there are also enough people who simply hate over-functional-audio-players like Amarok/iTunes/WMP. I’m one of them.
My HiFi CD player.
Thom, have you taken a look at Muine ? UI-wise, this is the best player for me
Muine? That is a new one. Hmmmmm.
http://muine.gooeylinux.org/
Don’t see anything special about it.
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/apps/
Mono! Uggh. Can’t you pick a different one? There are plenty to choose from.
The UI is really clean: you just choose from a list using keyword or (much more useful for me, much faster) from the cover. Nothing else. Of course, if you are the kind of people who like amarok, you will not like it.
But its UI is quite special, and its developers put a lot of thought in it.
None that works as well as muine for me. I just want to be able to choose my music from the disc cover, and that’s it.
…forcing them to do weird things like vertical tabs and tabs inside tabs with scrollarrows on them.
Hmmmm. Never seen that, but I think I might know what you’re talking about there. It’s not really ideal and they’ll have to sort it because they’re trying to create too many containers for various things, but I have much bigger annoyances with various UI related things.
Still, there are also enough people who simply hate over-functional-audio-players like Amarok/iTunes/WMP. I’m one of them.
You either get a very simple player that plays one file at a time, or you get into the realms of playlists, and once you get into playlists……..you’re into playlists.
“Give us a laugh and tell us what media [you mean audio player, right?] player you think is the best.”
My HiFi CD player.
Then use that while you’re using your computer then. It’ll mean fiddling about finding CDs, you won’t necessarily be able to mix tracks off different CDs unless you have a multi-changer and it’ll take you a while to get that set up each time, but I’m sure you’ll manage.
I listen to albums, not tracks. On top of that, I really go into an album, so I can easily listen to the same album weeks on end. My album collection is sorted in such a way that I can find any CD in my collection within 1 second. Literally. That’s faster than iTunes or Amarok can do it.
So no, none of the things you said apply.
Edited 2007-09-24 14:58 UTC
Oh boy, not this again. I think I’ll stay out of this one.
Of course it is your choice. But I find it absolutely mystifying that you’re complaining about there not being a simple app like MS Paint available, and then using a poor alternative just to avoid running a KDE application.
As others have said, Kolourpaint is basically exactly like MS Paint, except without the little annoyances (like not having more than two zoom levels) and some more powerful features. It’s a great tool for quick and dirty image modifications (like resizing, labeling, cropping, etc).
I understand your point, but in actual practice you have two major disadvantages when you mix applications using different toolkits:
1. you have to install and keep up to date more stuff
2. you have more stuff to load into memory
and if the distro you’re using hasn’t put some work into a common theme (which wouldn’t be your first choice anyway, probably …) you’ll also have different GUIs on your desktop.
So, I sort of agree with you … but actually try to use Gnome only apps
Rehdon
Rehdon,
Well, either way, whether it is a Gnome app or a KDE app, it is one more application to update and if it’s a KDE application in a Gnome environment, there might also be a slightly larger number of libs to update vs. a monolithic environment.
The memory usage is slightly higher, but it is unnoticeable most times, considering the very high specs of even the cheapest computers nowadays.
For me, however, the benefits outweigh any potential downsides. I like to use the best tool for the job, irrespective of whether it’s a Gnome or KDE application.
Finally, I have found that Gnome applications look just fine under KDE, thanks to the GTK Styles and fonts applet in KDE’s control center and I have also used KDE applications such as Kdissert on my work Ubuntu desktop and the differences in look and feel were very minor for the most part.
I think we have bigger fishes to fry than trying to reimplement every application in the toolkit of our choice, but then again people are free to do whatever tickles their interest: it’s free software after all.
Edited 2007-09-23 21:56
“1. you have to install and keep up to date more stuff”
Which distribution in 2007 doesn’t automatically keep track of updates for you?
“2. you have more stuff to load into memory”
This might actually be a valid point, but even on my old Athlon 1.4 Ghz with 380 MB RAM I couldn’t notice any significant system slowdowns when I run GNOME and KDE apps at the same time. Memory usage is still fine when I have Gedit, Firefox and Amarok running at the same time. Today, my system has 1 GB RAM and loading a KDE app doesn’t seem to make any difference in perceived memory usage.
I think this “uses too much memory” is overrated anyway.
– Consider OpenOffice: it uses it’s own widget toolkit, but few GNOME/KDE users are religiously avoiding OpenOffice the way that they’re avoiding apps that use the “other” toolkit.
– Consider most commercial Windows apps. One can say that each one of them use their own widget toolkits because of all the custom controls. Windows Media Player looks totally different from standard Windows apps, so it’s definitely not using the standard Windows widget set. MSN Messenger looks totally different as well, and I don’t think it uses the same widgets as Windows Media Player. Throw in WinAmp, Trillian, Adobe Reader and a few other Windows apps, and you easily have 6 different widget toolkits on Windows. Yet I don’t hear Windows users avoiding Adobe Reader because it uses a different widget toolkit.
“and if the distro you’re using hasn’t put some work into a common theme (which wouldn’t be your first choice anyway, probably …) you’ll also have different GUIs on your desktop.”
Since the review is about Ubuntu: I’d say Clearlooks (GTK) and Plastic (QT) look pretty similar. My dad is a total computer n00b (he has trouble understanding tabs in Firefox or even copy & paste) but he can’t seem to notice the difference between GTK and QT apps.
I couldn’t have said it any better… +1!
it is not irrational at all – the two toolkits use different themes, button placements, dialogue boxes, etc etc etc
ever heard of gtk-engines-qt?
A way to disable tapping on trackpads: check
Only by using the insecure SHMConfig option. There’s a very good reason that it’s not enabled by default. The code I’ve added to Ubuntu is layered over X, so provides the same security level as the rest of the input configuration. It’s a little bit of a hack at the moment (but no worse than the Wacom driver’s configuration), so I’m not pushing it upstream until I’ve worked with the X developers to standardise the interface.
This “waste of time” could have been avoided form the start if the Linux devs/community had settled on a single unified standard for writing applications, so that different toolkits were unnecessary. AS it is, if you are a developer considering writing an application for Linux, for all intents and purposes, there are two versions of Linux you need to choose from GTK+ Linux or QT Linux. This is just a ridiculous situation, and it needs to be fixed.
I have two possible answers to your assertion:
(1) Yes, this having to choose when writing applications is a terrible situation, nearly as bad as having to choose between the old win32 API and the new .NET API … which also needs to be fixed.
(2) Rubbish. Just like the situation in Windows with the old win32 API or the new .NET API, the situation on Linux with GTK+ or QT is such that the same machine can easily execute applications written to either standard, so it just gives a developer more choices.
You can choose for yourself which position you would rather argue for or against … but do be sure to treat different OS platforms in the same manner, won’t you?
Edited 2007-09-24 11:32
lemur2, what’s up with this almost obsessive-cumpulsive kneejerk reaction to immediately point fingers whenever someone points out (what he perceives as) a flaw in Linux? It is about as weak an argument as it gets, you see. “Mommy, why am I not allowed to do xyz, but Jimmy from down the street can! It’s just not fair!”
On top of that, who has said that the original poster does not lament the situation just as much on Windows as he does on Linux? You have no reason to assume he doesn’t, you see.
Personally, I have lamented the lack of graphical consistency on Windows and OSX often enough – in fact, I have even said that if a user wants a graphically consistent environment – stick to GNOME.
Edited 2007-09-24 11:40 UTC
Again, the same old argument to defend bad design by making comparisons to another piece of bad design as if that justifies it. The difference of course is that GTK+ and QT are both approaching the same task as competing modern toolkits, whereas Microsoft is gradually phasing out an old toolkit in favour of a new one. The situation for Windows is nevertheless very messy, and is a classic example of failing to break with old, worn out methods for the sake of backwards compatibility. Windows needs to ditch Win32 and move to a unified 64 bit API.
No, what it does is force developers to make a choice they should not have to make. It should be a case of “this is the API for writing Linux applications, deal with it”, not “pick your favourite API and screw the end user into an inconsistent UI experience”. QT applications behave inconsistently on GTK desktops much of the time (and vice versa). You need to install extra libraries if you want to run QT apps on a Gnome desktop (or v.v), and bugs that affect a GTK app only when running on KDE are less likely to be fixed.
I do treat all OS platforms in the same manner. I can give you an endless list of gripes I have with Windows or OSX or BSD etc., but the discussion at hand was the issue with GTK/QT interoperability on Linux. You assumed (incorrectly) that I was criticising what I perceive as a flaw in the design of one operating system as though other OSes were beyond reproach, which is not the case. I am quite happy to take any OS you care to mention (that I have used) to task, without fear or favour.
No, it’s a ridiculous statement.
You are technically right, but there are historical reasons for that. As far as I remember: QT toolkit was the first serious UI toolkit available on Linux, but was not free software at the time. So people begun to code a fully free alternative – GTK. When GTK was ready (and QT became free), there was already a lot of QT code around, so the split stayed there.
Why didn’t the GTK guys wrote a free QT clone (so that apps could be ported) instead of reinventing their own toolkit, I don’t know.
GTK was not written from scratch to compete with QT. At the time QT was being used as the foundation of KDE and Stallman and other zealous folks decided that a closed source toolkit just Would Not Do GTK was already existent and was in fact the most mature toolkit available under a free license. GTK started its life long before KDE chose QT and that was as the toolkit for the GIMP (it’s in the name: GTK == Gimp Tool Kit). The GIMP developers needed their own toolkit because the TKs available to them at the time did not support the rather advanced stuff they needed for their image editor.
Eventually a Clone-QT project was started and it is precisely because this project was nearing completion that Trolltech GPL’d QT for Linux. And when the GPL’d Linux version of QT was *almost* finished being ported to Windows they GPL’d the Windows version as well.
The major thing dividing the two camps is and has always been C vs. C++ and not so much a license thing. The licensing problem was a very real problem only for the first year or two. Some kind of accommodation or merger would probably have begun, except that C developers hate C++ and C++ developers hate C. This is the one major reason you will never, ever see GTK and QT join together.
Thereis GTK and GTK+
Functionality in KDE is pretty much irrelevant for a review of a Gnome-oriented distribution.
None of the mentioned functionality is particularly important, and some are true disasters like checking for the missing attachment (damn, that’s one to disable instantly). Gnome has always had a dialog to change monitor resolution, so nothing new here, really.
And it does have several simple snapshot- and painting applications (though painting applications are not a part of Gnome itself).
Personally I hope we’ll get rid of some of the NIH-syndrome when KDE4 is released and QT4 becomes _the_ KDE-toolkit. Integration between QT4 and GTK2 is much better than between QT3 and GTK2. That’ll make it much easier to combine tools across the tool-kits.
There are several valid reasons to avoid having applications from more than one tool-kit.
*For each tool-kit you need you increase resource usage.
*Different tool-kits have different behavior leading to inconsistent – and often confusing – UI.
*Different looks for applications – again leading to inconsistency and perhaps also some confusion.
There is a very good reason for having applications from more than one tool-kit. It may be split into several sub-reasons if one cares about that.
*Bigger pool of applications to choose from, resulting in a much more mature and efficient Desktop.
Personally I don’t think much of k3b and Amarok, but I do have Konqueror installed (and therefore some parts of KDE as well).
But let’s see. QT4 is here, KDE4 is just around. They work better with Gnome and GTK2 than KDE3+QT3 do. There’s still hope to beat NIH.
Have you ever read the Gnome announcements? There rarely are more than 2 or 3 REALLY NEW things in there, they are one big deja-vu for KDE users. Though, I must say often the KDE thing has gotten old – so it hasn’t improved lately, and the Gnome implementation is often better.
Sorry, I could’t go any further with this than when you say that an upgrade install screwing up your system is “not a bad thing”.
That’s a terrible attitude.
Would it be said about a Windows upgrade install screwing up the existing setup being “not a bad thing”? No, it wouldn’t and isn’t.
Terrible…
As someone already pointed out previously on this thread, had it happened to any other Linux distro on the planet and the reviewer would be bashing it to death, with a large following agreeing with his conclusions. Ubuntu managed to break THE best thing about Debian – not for the first time, I shall mention – but people still will go out of their way to praise it…
Different strokes for different folks, indeed.
The guy used an unsupported method of upgrading to unsupported software… its hard to say that this makes ubuntu any worse than debian, because debian is fallable too!
it would be more horrible if this was actually a release
Because we never expect things to break in products that are in development.
It was too much trouble to read through the comments, wasn’t it? Like I said earlier: “You misunderstood me. I am not saying the messed up upgrade is good – I’m saying that the fact that I can now do a fresh install is good. That is something completely different. A fresh install is much better from a reviewer’s perspective, as it creates a much more objective environment.”
Totally valid, if you’d review, like, Windows. But with a Linux distro one should expect a working update/upgrade path, since this is one of the major features of a Linux distro. I would never use a Linux distro which doesn’t have a working upgrade path, and I don’t care if it’s under development. They started from Debian, they should keep learning from it.
Funny I have done 4 upgrades so far from Feisty to Gutsy and all went perfectly, but I haven’t been able to get either my two testbeds or my two production machines to work with Compiz. Man I got to get to work on that! lol BTW Kolour Paint works great for me.
Cart
if you want more features, instead of whining, how about doing it yourself? or maybe working with a developer you know to do it??
The gnome devs are not your slaves…
Its great that someone listened to your feature request before and implemented it but you will need to ask nicer if you expect people to work on X or Y feature when you click your fingers…
There’s been a way in Gaim/Pidgin to change your MSN server side name for the last four major versions.
Accounts>[MSN Account]>Set Friendly Name
While it may not instantly jump out, or be as nice as the /nick command that there is on Windows (when MSN Plus is installed), it’s still there and to say that it’s not simply because you’ve not looked, or not read the Pidgin FAQ, is silly.
I only know one OS in the world that you can upgrade without problems and is the BSD systems.
With linux when you want to upgrade, the best and “only” way is a fresh install…
just my 0.2 cents
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In my experience, more often than not an upgrade without a fresh install is fine. When a fresh install is required, the release notes will tell you so.
In any event a fresh install is often easier anyway than an upgrade, especially if you have a separate /home partition.
Yes you are right, whenever I want to upgrade ubuntu, i will erase the root partition, and let home intact.
I think it should be considered an upgrade…
I have always upgraded ubuntu from the former version without any trouble for official releases: I am coming from debian, and there is just no way I would have considered ubuntu on my workstation for work if this was not the case (I cannot waste one week to reconfigure everything as before).
You may not know, but gutsy is still beta software: if gutsy was released, it would have been a big problem, but that’s really the kind of things to be expected in beta version. I have broken my installation several time testing alpha/beta versions of ubuntu, but there is nothing wrong with that (as long as it is fixed, of course, before release).
ghepeu@KazeNoTani ~ $ last |tail -n 1
wtmp begins Fri Aug 1 22:35:22 2003
That installation (Gentoo) migrated flawlessly through three different hard disks in two different machines and it keeps working without any problem.
If you are an atheist, that should be “dear universe” shouldn’t it ?
http://pictoral.blogspot.com/2007/09/dutch-driving-test.html
Just funny to see that one of the music players you mention insists on vertical tabs, Thom
http://www.exaile.org/screenshots/7/exaile_large.jpg
Anyways – I very much agree with you on the GTK/QT thing, although I wish there was something as good as k3b for gnome … then again, Brasero (http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/Brasero) is pretty nice, as well.
I’m also liking the DLNA-compliant uPNP-plugin that appeared for rhythmbox in this release (I saw eugenia posted in the bug-reports for that one as weel). My PS3 will love it when it’s working
???
I haven’t mentioned this ‘Exaile’ at all, you must be confusing me with someone else. In fact, I don’t even know this application at all.
You’re right, it wasn’t you… My bad
Wow, they have made an app with less features but a more bloated interface… I must say that’s not a huge archievement, but it’s unique on linux. There are of course plenty worse-looking and less usable yet also less featureful apps on windows, but that’s another game.