Seth Nickel writes in his blog about the lack of concrete goals and vision in Gnome. Then Christian Schaller makes an interesting point about Mono, and how successfull it is with its rapid development and developer attraction. Later, Havoc Pennington joined the discussion in his blog: “Cool things happen via a thousand small, practical steps” he said, as more practical problems still exist and need fixing before everyone hurries to “do cool things”. Get more opinions at PlanetGnome.
Gnomers Editorializing: Getting Cool Things Done
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hmm I was reading the blog entry from Ureaus (Christian Schaller) and don’t find anything related to ‘Mono … how successfull it is with it’s rapid development …’. More a general description how new people who like to help should be treatened. E.g. instead being sent to b.g.o for digging out 2 year old bugreports that no one was willing to fix, they should better do some more constructive things getting into GNOME in general. More or less these were his points. At least from what I was able to dig out of it.
Furthermore I want to criticise about how OSAlert is being abused to ‘create opinions in the minds of people’ by clearly present their articles in a way that easily leads to misunderstandings or way of directing the float of opinions. We always read things from Seth or Havoc and people have the tendency to treat them like being some sorts of GODs or some sort of directors while they are not. Even normal conversation of own personal visions made by 2 people are taken as some sort ‘defacto way to go’. I am not here to judge whether they have some valid points or not (they do quite often, but they also do mistakes as often enough as well (with other words, they also tell a lot of bullshit)) but I would like to repeat here that GNOME is community work (something some people will never understand, regardless how often this stuff is being repeated). Thus I recommend before releasing such articles that those who writes them should first spent a bit into HOW DOES GNOME WORK in real life. There is the GNOME Foundation, people can go there and apply for membership, people then have the full right to participate on elections for all kind of stuff. Like in real democracy every contributor and foundation member has the abillity to raise his opinion and be participant of elections around GNOME. This includes people like Seth Nickel, Havoc Pennington, Richard M. Stallman, Alan Cox, … and many others. We then all have the chance to explain ourself, bring up comments and worries on mailinglists where we can clearly explain what we think about this. As this should always be done in a good way. I’m a bit worried that we are all being treatened the same but some others are treatened a bit MORE as the same
I for my own as part of GNOME, as member of the GNOME Foundation do not like to see Mono to become some sort of PART inside GNOME. And this is what I gathered from this Article – A try to manifest MONO as part of GNOME. If the inclusion of MONO is being discussed normally on the Mailinglists and people who participate in the conversation (usually other developers or members) agree with it then be it that way, it has been decided in a democatic way. But please not with such public, well hidden, articles.
One should just wonder, why not _more_ people join in these discussions. I can tell you: most are sheep, and happy with it. The _want_ others to step forward and do all the thinking, they _need_ “gods” they can follow. I could imagine this is even moreso the case with programmers, because many of them do not follow some more traditional religion.
If you (or anyone else) has problems with a software project heading in a general direction defined by only a handful of persons, then you (or anyone else) should probably begin taking part in these people’s discussions.
For most of the time, you live in the world that you made yourself.
“Cool things happen via a thousand small, practical steps” he said, as more practical problems still exist and need fixing before everyone hurries to “do cool things”.
Wow, making sure the existing features work properly before adding new ones? What a novel idea!
oGALAXYo, these are blogs. They are quite obviously personal opinions. It would be quite dull if everybody had to say “This is my personal opinion, but” at the start of every sentence. Yes, it would be nice if OSAlert provided a little context when posts things, so people know what they are reading.
I’d also like to make it very clear that you do not need to be a GNOME foundation member to participate on the mailing lists.
Regarding, Mono, it was hardly mentioned in the blog entries. I don’t know what your on about.
I don’t know why you are personaly attacking me now – But why should I care. I am more or less on your side here – It’s exactly more or less the same stuff you and I see. I know they are blogs and It was my point to make clear that these things should not belong here. But the OSAlert editors make more out of it that it is. Blog’s are and should never been taken as form of resources for something. It may mislead, create misunderstandings or suggest people that there is more than there really is.
I must admit that I may have been wrong regarding to the foundation membership but my general points were differently. When you go back on OSAlert (in case you participated that long) then you may have noticed that there is some sort of ‘opinion creating’ going on here.
Regarding MONO, exactly it’s hardly mentioned in the blogs. I do share your opinion too, so why was it brought up here in first place specially covered in that topic ?
You shouldn’t criticise me here.
I’ll tell you exactly what the goal of open source development should be. The goal is to move in the most natural direction, in ones nature, and that is through generalization.
I don’t know why open source development would not focus on generalization, but it doesn’t. For one thing, you don’t have to protect the source code, there is no need to hide it so that nobody has control but the library maintianer, so we should have visual tools that make it easier for all of us, especially beginners, to contruct systems architecture, and those tools eventually will progress so that they are intelligent agents that write the code for us.
Open source development should be more flexible, but not though specialization, yet we should have architecutre that bridges point A and point B, and that’s all that the architecture does, it’s generic, it’s not a product, and our architecture should be organic, we should be able to install components that we test in user mode and than choose to use that component as default, we want an organism that can’t be shut down, it is an entity, that’s what we need. As individual users we also need to establish a personal identity with our computer, the computer should know us as individuals, and we should be able to express ourselves in order to build environments based on differentation.
.. I don’t get your point.
The point is that when you develop architecture through by generalization (the direction of) you will see that it is more natural to the nature of open source technology than specialization. There are simply more opportunties. Open source is by nature the opposite of vendor technology. When you develop on a vendor product you are specializing through reuse of vendor libraries, but when you develop on an open source platform progress is made through generalization because you are not constrained by feasibility and a product.
With open source technology you have the opportunity to be in control over the parts that you want to run, the parts that you want installed, the parts that you want to keep secret, it’s like a space ship contructed of a thousand parts. Open source provides you with the opportunity to focus on those parts, not just the driving aspect of the ship.
However you guys are only interested in driving the ship and that is because all the parts have not been revealed, we know that they are there, but they are not accessible, and you are too focused on driving the space ship. The goal is not natural, you are focusing on the goals of vendors who are old rust bucket star fighters that were around before you were born and who have to slowly integrate new ideas because they are severly constrained by the requirement that they keep all of their space ships parts hidden.
… I don’t know if I understood much of what you write but anyways let’s jump on it … You write a lot without any significant context – context that one can use to build a fundament of conversation on it …
First of all GNOME is far from being an Enterprise plattform or an Enterprise architecture. An architecture that you can use in large companies to do productive work. GNOME is by far immature to achieve this goal but this is not a limitation of the plattform. It’s more the limitation of the people working around it. the people contributing to this plattform are responsible whether they may achieve this goal, if they want to achieve the goal or whether they have a clue what this all is about … GNOME is full of individual people, different education, different skills, different position, different needs, different understandings. While there are some people who want to make a business out of it (e.g. see some mad competition with Windoze – which they never compete with anyways) others see a simple desktop around it that they can use to listen to MP3’s watch some PRON and surf the net. We have a mixture of all these people and this is not just GNOME related this is a global thing in open source (What ever open source or free software is. Everyone has his own understanding in it).
To make an Enterprise solution which means, you understand what you are doing and you have the developers who have the balls to do this then you’d better off creating an own plattform that achieves this goal and fills the gap. You and your company are under full control of this architecture and plattform and you can make exactly that out of it that you and your company likes to see it to become. But you can’t expect this to be achieved by the current people working on that plattform. Normal schoolars, students, people who are backery or car mechanic, who come home at evening, eat, sit down for some hours hacking their poorly tools and then head off next day to go work again. Basically this is what open source is.
Sure under GNOME there are quite powerful people, people who make sense sometimes, who see that there are needs to work on and where the majority of people see the same thing. E.g. simplification, cleanup, HIG, more cleanup, making duplicate functions in libraries die in favor of more advanced ones etc. This all makes sense and people can easily be convinced that this is necessary. Re-using components, making things become better is always welcome and you can sell this argument to everyone.
What you can’t sell to everyone is that you want to compete with Microsoft Windows for example or MacOSX. There are only some corporate interests and business people who like to have this stuff or think that way. The majority of people found on open source care less whether their product competes with Microsoft alternatives or not. They are simply happy to hack their stuff and release it every now and then and are happy whenever some people talk about it.
GNOME as KDE are quite mature plattforms these days and the majority of people like to have clean stuff, optimized stuff, stuff that interprocess communicate and things that they see on other architectures which makes sense for them. Let’s examine the open source community in general the majority of applications are written in C the next majority is C++ then all the scripting languages to make tiny solutions (basically this).
KDE for example (this is just a neutral view) have their desktop written in C++ throughly from beginning to end. They have constantly using this Object Oriented language to do their goals and they are quite successful with it. C++ specifications have no real standards and it’s more or less poorly supported in gcc but it’s maturing and getting better. Now that they finally found some agreement (but hey I am no expert here). GNOME on the otherhand is full of freaking languages, C, Perl, Python, the corba compiler, and whatever it’s a dependency hell, from a programmers view of point it’s a nightmare to deal with. While the architecture is maturing and becoming better (as described above) the core still requires half a dozen programming languages on your system and the excuses found are ‘hey it should be available on any modern linux distro’. But we are dealing with dependencies hell already, a lot of program to library dependencies, a lot of library to library dependencies, a lot of language to language depedencies and so on. If soon C# and MONO becomes part of it as well then good bye, who can track all this illness down ? The majority of people working on this are volunteers and not fulltime people who have the time to deal with it 24hrs and fix all bugs and problems for all sorts of languages. Is it a C program, is it a Python program, is it a C++ program, does the problem inherit from C++ library or the C library, does the problem hit from Python and so on.
MONO, C# or .NET is nothing else than a marketing gimmick made by some company who are trying to SELL stuff for money without any real life benefits besides some marketing made arguments that sells perfectly. There is nothing in open source that you can’t do with either C or C++ and the sales argument to be faster with C# and MONO rather than C or C++ is rather holdless as well. After all it depends on the programmer’s skills, abilities and the time investigated. We should defragment GNOME in this case, not just from the UI, not just from the libraries, we should also defragment the languages used in the CORE GNOME, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow people to use MONO, JAVA or whatever their needs are, no I like to encourage them to do this, but we should make sure that the core components are mostly written in either C or C++ and if we see only 3 python scripts being used in overal GNOME then we should consider replacing them with C, C++ or BASH alternatives rather than forcing people to install and use python only to have these handful scripts being dealth with.
Well I could write a lot more but I think for the moment this is enough, enough to think about and talk about it. I’m not in competition to Microsoft or Apple, nor do the majority of GNOME hackers with some exceptions who are not mainstream of GNOME anyways.
I agree with you on everything, except a few. I don’t like mono, I don’t see its benefits over existing tools, libraries and programming languages, especially C/C++. I’d hate for it to be adopted by gnome for no other reason than following the .NET bandwagon.
On to the main issue. Most gnome applications or tools are seperated into a backend (what some people call the engine or the kernel) and a frontend (what we know as the GUI). Majority of gnome backend apps are written in C, and very few in those weird high level languages. The frontend is where the confusion arises. People doing their on thing with gkt-python bindings and gtk-perl bindings and so on. At least that’s what I’ve observed, but I may be mistaken.
However, developing a GNOME app in mono is just an excuse for boredom. I don’t see any mono libraries in my hard disk any time soon or in the future. Most of my comments here are personal, nobody should take offense to it. I encourage anyone to constructively disagree with them or offer better insights.
> I don’t know why you are personaly attacking me now
I’m not. I just replied to your comment. There was nothing personal about it.
> You shouldn’t criticise me here.
Don’t be such a muppet. (That was almost a personal attack).
I don’t care about vendor products but what concerns me about Linux is that it is not alive. The operating system doesn’t understand that if there is a security flaw somewhere, than it has to be patched immediately. My computer doesn’t do this for me, instead I have to download the patch manually and ask the computer to install it by typing a command to run a script. Furtheremore I don’t know if that patch really was a patch or else some virus because I’m lazy and I don’t read the code, and my computer doesn’t even read the code, it just goes ahead and does the installation.
I’d like to be able to visualize my operating systems parts and I want that information to be a high level 3D view into my operating system but a view which I can break down into lower level views of individual parts all the way down to the machine code. It has to be dynamic because as soon as something changes I want to be able to know about it, I want to be able to trace the change, to reverse it if necessary. I want my computer to be alive, to be an organic organism with a social infrastructure defining it’s behavior, with the end points being humans.
oGALAXYo: have you bothered to read Christian’s blog?:
“Based on this I started to think about the projects that I am familiar with. Mono seems to be an example of a project that has had relative ease at attracting new developers. While a part of this of course is attributed to the energetic style of Miguel, which clearly helps to both bring in new people and motivate excisting ones, so do Mono share many traits with my flag project. You have a clearly defined list of classes that needs implementing with some classes perfect for someone new and some classes a good challenge for someone experienced. Each class is to some extenxt also a standalone entity which you can work on as a separate project.”
This is not about trying “to manifest MONO as part of GNOME”, it was just a comparison. Later, Christian adds:
“But then again GNOME is very much the opposite of the Flag project or Mono. First of all it doesn’t have something predefined to implement, which means there are no good list of tasks needing doing. Secondly as things gets more and more integrated many of the tasks have ramifications for other parts of the project, which means doing something tends to mean you might need to relate to a lot of different stakeholders which can be both frustrating and hard, especially for someone new to the project.”
Please don’t make false assumptions.
Why, then, instead of complaining/discussing, won’t you start DOING something to improve/fix/clone the project you’re interested in?
> oGALAXYo: have you bothered to read Christian’s blog?
; quote
Hmm I was reading the blog entry from Ureaus (Christian Schaller) and don’t find anything related to ‘Mono … how successfull it is with it’s rapid development …’. More a general description how new people who like to help should be treatened. E.g. instead being sent to b.g.o for digging out 2 year old bugreports that no one was willing to fix, they should better do some more constructive things getting into GNOME in general. More or less these were his points. At least from what I was able to dig out of it.
; quote
This is a direct quote to my first reply here. Do you see me saying anything else ? The sentence that explains manifesting MONO inside GNOME was more related to OSAlert’ editors rather than Christian.
Okay, regarding .Net or Java. Well it’s a strategy to control people because it is more flexible than native code for maintaining control over research and development.
The vendor can still protect the source code and hence maintain control but now the vendor can offer more advantages to the solutions developer. The programming environment is decoupled from the native platform. This means that the vendor can hide the system interface and thus prevent developers from generalizing, instead the developer must specialize by reusing vendor libraries and applying specializations through inheritance to meet the domain requirements.
If North America can move all of the specialists out of the country, specialists being developers who use vendor products, than North America can literally keep the research and development in this country. The North American developers will be generalists, those who control the factors of production. Another word for them is the knowledge workers.
Ofcourse miltinationals will adopt vendor technology because they are mostly headquartered in America but get their workforce from countries outside North America. So we can deploy our technology through these multinationals, but the IT technology can not allow people to generalize, it must force them to specialize. Our system API is hidden, you can’t generalize, you must specialize through the user mode API.
We will also deploy chians or networks of schools that provide an undergraduate degree that is sponsored by vendors because it only teaches students how to specialize through vendor tools and libraries. These school networks are the pool of workers that our multinational deployments will draw from, in respective countries.
GNOME on the otherhand is full of freaking languages, C, Perl, Python, the corba compiler, and whatever it’s a dependency hell, from a programmers view of point it’s a nightmare to deal with. While the architecture is maturing and becoming better (as described above) the core still requires half a dozen programming languages on your system and the excuses found are ‘hey it should be available on any modern linux distro’.
I don’t know where you get this. Sure, Gnome has lots of bindings, but you aren’t obliged to use/build them.
There is nothing in open source that you can’t do with either C or C++ and the sales argument to be faster with C# and MONO rather than C or C++ is rather holdless as well.
Well, you should ask Miguel de Icaza, who has enough experience programming Gnome applications in C, if it isn’t faster to program in C#. In your first post you say: “Furthermore I want to criticise about how OSAlert is being abused to ‘create opinions in the minds of people’ by clearly present their articles in a way that easily leads to misunderstandings or way of directing the float of opinions”. It is clear by now that it isn’t OSAlert but YOU the one that is trying to create opinions over here. If you feel strongly against .NET, and you see that it somehow gets used in Gnome in the future, feel free to fork it and get ride of everything you hate, but do not sparse wrong views.
With Gnome you are building software that is for people and businesses to use for free or the price of a distribution, but vendor products are different because they don’t want to help people, they have a strategy that they want to deploy, and that strategy is decided by a power elite, a group of people who have a great deal of authority over the resource of an entire country which happens to be the richest and most powerful country. These doors are closed, because the power elites consult with each other about strategies, they do not choose software, they form agreements with each other.
If we had a leader who was a knowledgable coder like Murray, but he would also have to be interested in system implementation than we could break off from the vendors for the first time. Open source development would finally begin. Going in the right direction (generalization) would start to open doors to all kinds of new ideas, and one of the goals would be to put the control into the hands of the users, it is an opposite goal to what vendors want. The only thing that you have to watch out for is that the power elite doesn’t send out people to blow you away, hope you are hidden well.
> I don’t know where you get this.
I got this from – well – a shitload of years using GNOME, writing own GNOME apps (Atlantis), co-author’ing other GNOME apps (e.g. BALSA), speaking with other developers and I am the guy who wrote CVSGnome and maintained it for the past 3 years. A build system for GNOME which I spent a lot of time to maintain, testing, building GNOME, writing FAQ’s for than other people building GNOME from sources.
Miguel de Icaza is defacto irrelevant for GNOME 2 because he hasn’t contributed anything to it (this doesn’t mean that he is not a reliable or fine person in general). He is interested to promote MONO because it’s his companies baby. MONO is Ximian’s work which has nothing directly to do with GNOME itself. I do understand that Miguel would like to see it in GNOME which then makes life easier for him and his company but that’s basically his own opinion. Which again brings us back to ‘GNOME is communitywork (see first reply)’. Well if Miguel says writing apps with MONO is faster than using C++ then it’s his good right to belive this misbelief. At the end it’s all a matter of skills from the programmer itself who uses it. A MONO programmer can take as long to write an app as for example a skilled C or C++ programmer.
C and C++ programmers can’t compete with .Net because the people who use .Net have a solution for the masses that is integrated with their entire product line (Database, Office, Web Server, Email Server, etc). Some of that stuff doesn’t even use open standards. They have superior visual tools (VS.Net) and they are developing a specialized solution with one integrated tool.
Mono is a slightly different story. They have to work like hell just to keep up with .Net. I’m surprised that anyone who develops Mono would have time for this conversation.
…must probably be the *only* man in open/closed source
that I always disagree with his opinions.
I think at least some of Gnome’s slugginess could be attributed to him.
I’m not talking about his code, mind you. I’m talking about his project
…management skills.
Also, regarding ooGalaxyoo’s comments on Mono.
OK, so you are a developer, but that doesn’t qualify your opinion on C# any better (I’m a computer scientist myself, btw).
The stuff about being able to do the same stuff in C/C++ is just personal dribble. Yes, one could do it in assembly too, that doesn’t mean it would do it as fast [as in no need to manage memory, hundrends of built-in library classes as standard (no dependency nightmare as with C/C++ libraries), dynamic bindings, etc]. So, all in all, it’s the same stupid argument, as in “you can do OO in C”.
Seth raises some good points, and ones I’ve often thought about. 1.4 -> 2.0 was a MASSIVE improvement. It was literally an entire new desktop environment. Since then, the road to 2.4 has been marked with improvements and general increases to robustness, but unfortunately not a lot has changed. We have a few more apps, and a few more features. If this trend continues, by 3.x we’ll have more features than we can shake a stick at, and we’ll be surrounded by so many apps we won’t know what to do with them all. However, has there been any real innovation since 2.0? No, not really. Granted, we still need to address some pressing issues (like the lack of media player and decent sound player). But what’s new and incredible that wows people outside of the core gnome community? 2.4 saw the inclusion of gpdf as the default pdf renderer, and a new type of generic panel. KDE has been doing the generic panel thing for YEARS, and Windows has had a (still) better PDF renderer from Adobe since the dawn of time! While the core gnome community (myself included) Oooooh’d and Ahhhhhh’d, the rest of the world said “So what? We’ve had these things for years!”
The name of the game is still catch-up, and I don’t see many people thinking much beyond this stage. Seth is an exception, as he’s working on Storage (which I sincerely hope succeeds…brilliant brilliant concept) as well as the python init scripts, Ximian is showing some real polish and initiative with mono and dashboard, but aside from that, who’s really putting stuff out that impresses the world?
To put it another way, people have a general idea of what’s being considered for 2.6. Think ahead to 2.8….that’s a year or so down the road. Think ahead to 3.x, which is where we should be when Microsoft unleashes Longhorn. We’ve heard the hype surrounding longhorn…it’s gonna be huge. Microsoft has really been refining their technology in recent years, and unless the gnome community pulls together and makes ready to receive, the project will diminish into relative obscurity. By 2.8, almost certainly:
1) We will have a new file selector (who’s initial version looks only slightly less spartan than the old one)
2) All apps will be gtk2-based…finally
3) We will have a media-player and music player that are up to snuff by current industry standards
4) ????
In short, we will have matched Win98 in functionality. The only areas that are showing real innovation are getting minimal attention. Dashboard has been stagnant for months, and nobody seems to give a rat’s ass about integrating their apps with it. Storage is a long way off yet, and still remains potential vaporware (prove me wrong, Seth…prove me wrong). Basically, people are not looking towards the future.
Once we’re finally caught up and matching WinXP stride for stride, what then?
“C++ specifications have no real standards and it’s more or less poorly supported in gcc but it’s maturing and getting better.”
I’d like to just disagree with this. KDE was written in the start from C++ when there were no standards. Now that there ARE standards (read: the STL), KDE code has gotten progressively uglier to look at. GCC has good support for it (provided you don’t do stuff with templates, yeesh). Holding up KDE as a good use of modern C++ is almost laughable. GNOME’s C is also somewhat hacked, but at least there’s STILL a reason for it.
Compare QT code to GTKmm code. GTKmm is just a lot cleaner, because I’m able to use the STL on it, rather than having 50 million custom-designed ways of storing a string. I’m well aware that this isn’t KDE’s fault, really – again, C++ was rather undefined when Trolltech started using it, so this sort of thing had to be done.
C++ is not the end-all be-all of languages, and sure as hell the implementation Qt uses is not all that hot compared to some APIs, one of which is a GNOME binding. There’s also the fact that some people just don’t want to be bothered with memory management, or prefer the faster development times a language like C# or Python will give you. Why limit the developer?
And the fact is, it doesn’t matter. Python, C, C++, whatever. They all look the same to the end user, so why should the end user particularly care which language was used?
-Erwos
The problem with Dashboard is more along the lines that nobody’s stepped up to integrate the patches to the programs so that Dashboard can be used by them. That is to say, someone needs to officially submit the GAIM plugin for inclusion, integrate the Evolution patch in Evolution CVS, that sort of thing. For someone with time on their hands, this shouldn’t be too difficult. Hell, I’ve thought about reviving the project, but I doubt I have the programming skills to do it (don’t know C#).
Maybe I’ll make a C++ Dashboard rewrite…
-Erwos
The only chance that Linux has to being successful as a business enterprise product is by leveraging vendor middleware either by running Java or else being compatible with .Net, take that away and Linux doesn’t have much to offer enterprises.
If the Standard C and C++ developer was really more skilled than the vendor middleware solutions developer than there would be more of a focus on ‘system implementation’ with Standard C and C++. The approach to solutions is better accomplished with safe languages, safe runtime environments supporting safe type, logical library organization that can be reused, and tools that integrate enterprise infrastructure. The developer of solutions also does not want to concentrate on program logic but wants to focus on business and domain logic.
…and vendors like Sun and Microsoft work with a strategy (to create a type of developer who is dependant on them) and they have relationships with businesses and educational institutions to deploy their strategy, it’s not about developing high quality technology, it’s about controlling the factors of production and pushing technologies taht allow them to do that, they create the illusion that they are innovating, well in some ways they are, but they are innovating on their own terms, the innovation makes it more difficult for someone else to have control, because the innovation removes that possibility, it is a cover up.
So why does open source even bother to play the vendors game? You are supposed to be finding how to give control to the users and discovering how to proceed,…learning, by going in the right direction. Focus on the source code and generalize, build organic systems architecture, form a virtual knowledge base, you can do it, you guys.
I use Gnome, I like it. I choose to use it on my desktop instead of MS Windows or Mac, but lets face it, most people are not even given a choice, they have MS Windows forced upon them when they buy their computer, and than these people who have never known anything but Microsoft, defend it vigorously even the old crap like Win98 and WinME. Why do they do this?…because they become dependant upon it, and it is easier to use than alternative. Once that dependance is created you will have a difficult time persuading them to try something new. Now if you gave it everything you had and you unified Linux and you were able to make it easy like Windows would that make everyone switch? Well you would have to turn Linux into a vendor product in order to have a chance and it would still be a challenge. Even existing Linux users would complain that they don’t want an easy product, that it sucks.
So just think about going in the other direction. Think about finding ways to give control to the users. Focus on the source code, develop systems infrastruction that makes the research and development more accessible, that makes the code more accessible, that connects developers, and develop tools that help users to base their security of differentation, on ways of making Linux unbreakable and self directional.
I talked to Bjarne Stroustrup about QT and he had good things to say about it. He also said that these libraries need support that he realized that QT is not based on modern C++ but it is supported by a vendor and he felt that support was very important. He also said that he thought that QT was designed well and he considered it C++. I did my part to tell him about Gtkmm. Yet Stroustrup does not use a GUI for the majority of his work (he teaches at TAMU now) he didn’t know of a pure standard conforming GUI solution but it did not concern him half as much as I was concerned about it. He had not looked at the Gtkmm source code.
Gnome should indeed bugfix first. I tried the following:
– Start GEdit and type something.
– Choose Action-Logout
– A Save-As dialog pops up. Choose “Cancel”.
– The panel, the desktop and metacity quit.
– GEdit asks “Don’t save, Cancel or Save?”
– Choose “Cancel” again.
– GEdit closes and discards the file.
Now that’s great behaviour! I think that the Gnome people should fix these small (but very annoying) bugs first, before innovating. Thus:
– implement correct session management. Thus fix the above, and do “kill -9” on all session applications if X crashes.
– standardize the toolbar API and make all applications use it (Epiphany, for example, doesn’t)
– standardize file locations and integrate Nautilus into GTK+, so that fonts:/// and “Ghost selecting” doesn’t only work in Nautilus but also in Actions-Run and in file dialogs.
Havoc is one of the few linux developers that I agree with nearly 100% of the time. Miguel is another.
-G
Its a simple fact that desktops haven’t really changed much since the original Mac. OSX isn’t that different from the original Mac. Gnome copied from the Mac (and Windows). KDE copied from Windows. Windows copied from the Mac. Even the Mac, copied most of its true innovations from Xerox (mouse, bitmap GUI…). In fact, it is polish, not innovation, that made/makes the Mac special. Other products do pretty much everything that the Mac does. The Mac just does it a little better.
The computer desktop, in most of its flavors, has become a mature application (just like word processors and spreadsheets). Sure, there are differences, but they all work pretty much the same way.
Innovation is, by its nature, difficult. You never really know when it is going to work out, so it leads to a lot of dead-ends. I think it is possible, even necessary, for some people to focus on long term innovation with Gnome, but it can’t be the core focus of the project. For Gnome to be successful, most of the effort needs to go into polish and simply “getting it done”.
I just tried this and it worked the way it’s supposed to for me. I’m running gnome 2.2 on FreeBSD 5.1. Maybe it’s your distro’s fault,not gnome. Since I moved to FreeBSD I noticed that what I thought were gnome bugs were actually bugs in my distros (RedHat) implementation.
What is dashboard?
> What is dashboard ?
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/
Unfortunately it requires MONO.
> Havoc is one of the few linux developers that I agree with > nearly 100% of the time. Miguel is another.
Strange then, because IIRC they tend to disagree…
I realize that most people won’t care about this at all, but I’m a happy user of an outdated distribution and Gnome version.
I’m running RH7.1 and Gnome 1.4 and I love it! I have no desire to upgrade or change anything. I’ve used other distributions, operating systems and desktop environments. But I am incredibly satisfied. My system does everything I want it to and I don’t find anything confusing or inconsistent.
Sure, most of the applications are end-of-life due to the newer libraries, and beginning in January I’ll have to create my own upgrades for big security vulnerabilities in any services I use, but I have a wealth of great applications on a fantastic system using an excellent desktop. My cup overfloweth — I want for nothing.
Regardless of what the good people of Gnome decide to do in the future, they can only build upon a solid foundation as far as I am concerned. And I will always have the installation media and source code for their previous efforts, so all that’s left for me is to use my system as I see fit!
Some things might be the distribution (for example, Dropline was buggy as hell for me), but some other things certainly aren’t.
For example, Nautilus is just a stand-alone app, and that’s the whole point why things like beautiful selections and fonts:/// don’t work in GTK file dialogs.
Other things are just problems with the core of GNOME, for example, that GNOME-VFS has a very basic, too basic support for FTP. Entering a password in an URL, on the screen, in clear text, isn’t really secure!
By the way, I use FreeBSD 4.9 with Gnome 2.4.
About the state of Gnome: on our Performa 6400, I have installed Debian 2.2 with Gnome 1.0. I would think that’s a bit old, but Gnome 1.0 itself works fine. Only the AbiWord version is just horrible, can’t even do bulleted lists…
And I can imagine that a system with RedHat 5.1, KDE 1.1.2, Mozilla 1.0 and StarOffice 5.2 is all someone needs. Maybe a kernel 2.2 or 2.4 or XFree 4.x is a good idea to add, but for the rest…
Long term goals:
– Make sure the GNOME desktop has GUI tools for *everything*. A GNOME user should *never* have to revert to a terminal. Short-term examples are compiling/installation from tarball sources, and job scheduling (cron jobs).
– Integration. For example: when logging in with GDM, it first displays a blue screen before the actual login screen, then the blue screen again, and then the users desktop background. A better integration between GDM and gnome-session should result in displaying the users desktop background right after the login screen, just as an example of integration.
– Profiling, profiling, profiling. Making it snappy on a PII 300 /w 64Mb could be something to work towards. (Well, a goal at least..)
Short term goals:
– A killer IDE for GNOME development. The most common complaint from the non-GNOME/non-linux world is “it’s lacking apps”. And how do we cure this? Well, by making sure that developing for the GNOME desktop is a breeze, of course! Use Glade as a starting point and merge it with f.eg. Anjuta to create a state-of-the-art drag-n-drop/point-n-click IDE – and watch the world of GNOME apps explode.
– Implement a lock-down framework. Invaluable for enterprise/school installations.
– GTK hardware acceleration. IF the machine has a capable graphics card, AND there is a decent OpenGL driver for it, let GTK draw widgets using 2D OpenGL. I may be a layman here, but this should improve performance quite a bit.
– Make the current set of apps rock solid, so that development on new things can begin. Fix menu editing, fix session management, fix nautilus, etc. Speaking of which, concidering that nautilus uses ~10Mb in the background before the first window is opened, shouldn’t it at least use that memory to cache the users’ home dir in advance so that the first window could open directly when clicking on the home dir icon?
Well, this is just from the top of my head. Hope it makes sense somehow.
– A
“I usually don’t visit osnews to read peoples’ diaries and blogs. I think this is a new “LOW” at osnews.”
Hmm well, i don’t come here to read anything about MS but it still exists. I understand other people do, yet i can’t decide to technically filter instead of mentally on such news, while i’d like to.
OTOH, a democratic system could be added, allowing (registered) people to vote for an article on the homepage.
K5 has such a thing, for example. It works well over there. But i foresee few problems with this because of the ”love” to certain OSes.
The current way of how it works is just simply because of a small elite who can use appeal to force for just about anything. Bad thing if you ask me.
Instead of beeing a simple newssite just like all the others, the system can become more transparant. If the elite submits, the users cooperate…
This is a good news site just the way it is. Democracy might not work because only a portion of the eligible voters actually vote. In Canada and the USA this is especially true, we have among the lowest voter turnouts in the world, only about 60% of the people in the USA even bother to vote. I have the actual statistics in my sociology textbook for a given year, but I have that book in my truck but take my word for it, the turnout is low. Only people who want to censor will vote here.
I don’t see OSAlert losing it’s audience, in fact it seems to be growing. There is a need for a varitey of types of news articles, just don’t churn out all the same type but make sure to maintain the varitey.
“This is a good news site just the way it is. Democracy might not work because only a portion of the eligible voters actually vote. In Canada and the USA this is especially true, we have among the lowest voter turnouts in the world, only about 60% of the people in the USA even bother to vote. I have the actual statistics in my sociology textbook for a given year, but I have that book in my truck but take my word for it, the turnout is low.”
Ofcourse not everybody _will_ vote. That’s not the point, the point is everybody _can_ vote:) Perhaps you can state the reasons for this low percentage? I’m very interested.
“Only people who want to censor will vote here.”
Huh?
Oh btw you might be interested in the voting machines used in the USA…
http://www.why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html