GNOME needs some serious improvements. They need a good menu editor that will work correctly. The system is buggy.

Jorge Castro is absolutly corect! I personally am not married to either gnome or kde however both platforms are good and I appritiate all the hard work that goes into it I think Mr. Petreley needs to go read his Dale Carnegie book again and maybe re write his review.

It's true that more choices generally make for a worse user experience. Jorge could help us all by explaining why the Gnome 2.6 default for Nautilus is a UI paradigm that was abandoned.

What is it about this UI model that makes it good? It beats me, but then usability is a complex subject. How many users tested it? What tasks were people given and how did this compare with the previous behaviour? What were the results and discussion that lead to this being the best UI choice? Simple metrics, simple usability testing and a report on the rational decision making that lead to this choice would have been illuminating. Not rhetoric.

Further, changing the *default* behaviour requires an unusual tool. That's not usually a UI improvement. Jorge sets up a false target and then demolishes it - the challenge was not to change the current behaviour, but the default.

So, in summary, I share Nicholas' frustration. I don't think Jorge made a reasonable case against what Nick said, but against a caricature of Nick's article, making it into a personal attack rather than a rational response.

Long time received Computer World where Mr. Peterly had an article every week. Most of his article raised my blod pressure so I stopped reading the paper all together. I am totaly surprised of the fact that someone with such low grade jurnalizm capability can still be outthere making hear his voice that more people would be happy not to.

stan: Well, if Petrely writes emotional spat, what do you think he should get in return?

all this is pointless dribble, reading this kludge has done nothing but make me bored. If you don't like GNOME don't use it, simple. You all have a choice so stop whining like slashdot kiddiez. Nicolas doesn't seem to really have much of a clue about anything, and to all those out there that look up to him, I'll give you a dollar so you can buy a clue. This KDE vs. GNOME junk is old, Windows vs. Linux, BSD vs Linux, it's all just a waste of time. Nobody really cares, use what you want, use what you like and let others do the same. Stop being little bitches.

This is a poor rebutal to Petrely's opinion article. Jorge begins by telling us that he will provide facts to show why Petrely's opinions are wrong. Instead he provides an emotional spat with few facts and many vauge, even misleading, statements (as pointed out by many commentors already). If this is the best response GNOME has to offer, then Petrely must be right.

I don't understand what the big hooplah is for having buttloads of options everywhere. I for one consider myself somewhat of an expert user, but I don't want to change many options. I want to get work done, not hunt through preference dialogs. I want to go to a different computer and get things done without having to set a gazillion options. I want to install a new system and not have to set many preferences. I want to upgrade stuff without having to set many preferences. I want the documentation to be short concise and readable rather then having to consider all the preferences someone might want to use. An app with fewer preferences and modes of operation really is easier to document and is more likely to be documented and for the documentation to be correct. Yes this all means sometimes learning to live with the defaults even if they aren't exactly what I want them to be. But I don't care, I want to work, not twiddle preferences.

Another thing people don't understand is that if a program has many options, all the use cases are not tested well. There are many untested combinations leading to usability problems in case some option combinations don't make sense, through stability in case some option combinations make things crash to security problems. People completely ignore security. Simplicity leads to better, smaller code base, easier to debug, test and verify. If you consider an expert user as one who likes to twiddle preferences, then yes, GNOME is not for you.

Here's my experience:
The Gnome task bar keeps changing the size of the buttons, even when there's only two of them. I have no clue why.

In Nautilus, if I need to get to a deep directory, and only to that directory, I end up with one window for each directory in the hierarchy. I'm only interested in one of them. Yes, I admit; I can middle-double-click using emulate-3-buttons which means double clicking on the left and right buttons at the same time. If I have two of those hierarchies, and the windows obstructed, in order to raise the relevant windows I have to search through 2*(n+) items. Task grouping in the task bar MUST be enabled, otherwise the task buttons become too small to be usable. That adds one click to the process.

The Nautilus Browser, against basic usability accepted standards, sets its title to "File Browser: ...".

GGV and GPDF keep having this navigate-by-page interface. You scroll to the bottom of page 1, you switch to page 2, you get the bottom of page 2. The down key doesn't switch pages. Can't use those. This has been a problem since I've known these tools.

The terminal is slow and hungry for CPU resources. It used to be faster and more efficient.

The GTK+ file selector used to be quickly navigable using TAB completion (intuitive for the command line fella' at least). Now you have to press CTRL+L to get something similar (intuitive for no one). How does one know? Forums and/or mailing-lists.

These are things that I use over 50% of the time, and never seemed to work right in Gnome. That's not to say there are no good things in Gnome. There are. The problem is that instead of fixing things that don't work, they seem to prioritize coming up with new and radical things that introduce new problems.

Well Personally I dislike spatial nautilus but I love Gnome 2.6. I think 2.6 has a lot of nice improvements and works really well. While I do use browser mode for nautilus 95% of the time there are times when i would rather use spatial mode so while. While there are a few small complaints I do have such as the inability to see hidden folders with the new GTK 2.4, a few small bugs on the gstreamer end, and other various little things here and there I feel Gnome 2.6 was a good release and I greatly look foward to 2.7.x series and helping to test it.

Petrely: Yet GNOME is built on the premise that its developers are so much wiser than users when it comes to navigating folders and setting colors that GNOME users shouldn't have a choice in the matter.

Castro:Hmmmm, I must be a moron then. I like spatial Nautilus. Everyone I know who uses GNOME loves the spatial Nautilus, except for two. The other dozen or so dig it. Those that don't like it, shut it off and move on with their lives.

Me: Umm...the fact is you did not address his complaint. The fact is, "GNOME" decided to use Epiphany because it adhered more stringently to the usability guidelines which today seem to say "Dont offer customization through the UI". You know what?....Petrely is right. Taking all of the options out of the UI is clearly telling us all that the developers know better than we do. I want my options. And yes, I can make most changes from the command line. But why make me STFW for all the options and combinations? Why not just put an 'Advanced' button that will show more config options? Doesnt make sense. The more apps that go the way of epiphany the more Gnome desktop becomes a toy.

Its easy to say that "i dont like this option", so i'm not going to use gnome, poke your tounge out and run away..

I find lots of things "i dont like", but just deal with it. Gnome has a different philisopy than other "window managers", simplicity and clarity.

If you feel as though you know better, join the team and explain your feelings. You dont have to be be a coder to help.

Spatial nautilus is actually more efficient. The problem isn't with spatial nautilus, it's with people's expectations. The people that are having a problem with the spatial nautilus are used to doing things the Windows way. This is not just me talking. They have actually done usability studies and found that Gnome was easier for people to use because it wasn't trying to emulate Windows at every step in the road.

The next problem is the idea that spatial nautilus is being done on an incomplete file system, that not all of Gnome has readily adopted the concept of spatial. And that's true. However, I think it's completely unfair that you can expect the entire Gnome developer community to completely revamp the entire desktop (and ALL the applications) in a matter of only 6 months. It's the first step, and I for one am happy they took that step.

Next: Nick act's like some great harm has been inflicted on him. Now, I am not saying it's wrong to disagree (I moan about certain aspects about Gnome myself); however, he's not offering anything more than a troll would. The Gnome project isn't about building Nick his perfect desktop. It's about building the best desktop the Gnome developers can think to make. And you know what? They have to try things. New things. I find the same people complaining about spatial nautilus are the same type of people that complain that Linux DE's are just copying. So they will complain no matter what.

Finally, concerning all the insane amounts of options people want on their desktop. What about the option not to have all those damn options? I for one prefer a desktop that works to make itself usable by default. I don't want to spend hours having to customize every inane detail.

I always find it funny people saying Gnome is for the newbies and KDE is for the power users. I actually think it would be the opposite. Of course, I define power user as someone who actually wants to be productive, rather than someone who wants to spend five hours changing his font size in every single application.

Nick might be arrogant, but he's pretty right. I've used Gnome since the 0.58 days, and every time there's a new release its basically the previous release recoded again because they can never get it right. Gnome is basically on par with Win3.11. After years of waiting for a completed release I finally gave up and went to decent operating system.

[quote]
Misconception #1. The standard tree view is available by right clicking on a folder and choosing "Browse Folders", via the menu using "Browse Filesystem", or via the panel icon that looks like a file cabinet (it's there by default).
[/quote]

Of course, it is immediately obvious to someone with a folder open that "Browse" is somehow different than what they're doing already...

... on second thought, I'd have to say not.

I don't personally object that much to spatial Nautilus (at least, not enough to spend the time to turn it off, since I spend most of my time in a GUI-modded Konqueror anyway), but in my more cynical moods it really does seem like the Nautilus developers decided to go on a crusade to "convert the unrighteous" by making it too hard to get back to the old behavior.

Yes, I do know about GConf, but I don't use Nautilus enough to care. And while I agree that architecturally GConf is much more intelligent than the Windows Registry, GConf-Editor still has enough similarity to regedit that it can occasionally make me twitch.

[quote]
I don't think anyone that has used GTK's language bindings will use the word "inflexible".
[/quote]

I've used the C bindings and consider myself scarred for life. GTKmm and GTK# are tolerable, barely, but GTK+'s native form... is hideous. The only thing it has going for it is binary compatibility. (Which is not to be scoffed at, but compiler ABI's don't change that often, and C++ just makes things _so_ much more pleasent. And I _like_ having my signals autogenerated rather than having to manually call a function to create each one...) The GObject model, while a reasonable attempt to build an RTTI-capable object model in a language that makes no effort to support it, is still IMHO at best an effective hack. There are parts of the greater GTK+ family that I like (though I'd like them a lot more if they didn't use GObjects... but then they wouldn't be GTK+-ish) like Pango and GStreamer, but again I usually find GObjects to be too much of a pain to make them worthwhile. I'm just really glad that Cairo is too low-level to have been GObjectificated.

[quote]
Hmmmm, I must be a moron then. I like spatial Nautilus. Everyone I know who uses GNOME loves the spatial Nautilus, except for two. The other dozen or so dig it.
[/quote]

Fifteen people doth not a statistical sample make. Especially not such a self-selecting group as "my friends" or even "people I know well enough to know that they love spatial Nautilus."

nosrail:

The question is how to present the preferences. To have all the preferences in each application's GUI gets cluttered, confusing, and not very usable (some people believe that Konqueror suffers from this problem, though it's a wonderful piece of software). On the other hand, you, among others, have said that they resent looking up preferences in an application like gconf-editor, which is designed for expert users (presumably, like yourself) and which is supposed to hold a great many preferences that the developers believe are not a priority for your usual "user."

So, is there a middle ground? Perhaps there just needs to be a search function in GConf-editor as well as a makeover to make it *appear* to be less like Microsoft's Registry editor. (Note that architecturally, GConf and the Registry are nothing alike.)

The GNOME developers see pitfalls in putting all preferences in the application GUIs, and there are certainly a number of people who don't like GConf-editor. So, what's the solution?

I kind of agree with him. I am a fan of spatial nautilus, but I really hate GConf-editor. I am very glad that someone has criticised it well. I switched back to KDE 3.2 because there are too many options STILL in GConf-editor.

If GNOME 2.8 is going to get me back, its going to have to:

*Remove GConf-editor for good!
*Make the option between spatial/browse nautilus visible from the GUI, on the first tab of the preferences tab
*Have a total audit of the preferences dialogs, and make all the options available in a sensible way.

Usability means easy for both beginners AND experts. GNOME developers seem to have forgetton, expert users should NOT be "punished" for being experts.

For everyone who says that they loved GNOME 2.4 but dislike GNOME 2.6 because of the spatial nautilus, you can run GNOME 2.6 just the way you like. As someone else earlier pointed out,just "Run gconf-editor. Go to /apps/nautilus/preferences and check off 'always_use_broswer'." Now you have what's basically a GNOME 2.4 but with a lot of bugs fixed, a much faster help system, an improved file open/save dialogue, and lots of other goodies. Enjoy!

P.S. I imagine that will all this hoopla, the nautilus maintainers will add a preference for browser mode in the nautilus menus by the time GNOME 2.8 comes around. In the meantime, the above GConf setting should do the trick.

I was ecstatic when 2.4 came out. I think it was a vast improvement over 2.2. I was even more excited when I got a chance to try out 2.6, but it took me only a few hours to decide that I was better off with 2.4.

With 2.6, I felt, as Mr. Petreley did, that I had gone backwards in time. I am back in 2.4 now, and I'm much happier for it. My biggest fear is that I may not be able to upgrade to Slackware 10 because it will surely contain 2.6. I'd love to be able to run 2.4 on Slackware 10, but not if it means installing it without GNOME and then attempting to download and install 2.4, assuming that it would even be possible.

Basically, thanks to GNOME's design decisions, my next GNU/Linux OS desktop will be either KDE (horrors!), XFCE (not bad), or Fluxbox (fast but too minimal).

By default, the window of a child folder should open in the exact same location and size as the parent folder window. This would avoid cluttering the desktop.

Then this should be combined with a configurable property to automatically close the parent window. This would further make it appear like a normal file browser.

The main difference is that it retains its spatial behavior, so the next time you double-click on the same child folder, it will open a window in the place where you had it last time if you previous moved or sized it.

The mistake is if a folder does not have an explicitly set size and location, you should always use the parent's size and location to avoid clutter and confusion.

I would love spatial mode if it worked like this, because I do have certain directories that I always want opened a particular way. As it is now, though, it is a little difficult to use.

The Petreley article is right on the money... I've been going throught this same "anticipation that the next version will be better then the previous crap" phase and my experience has always been the same mentioned in the article. I dont care to see a multitude of Window Managers, just give me one that works well!

This has been my complaint with gnome for a long time too. back around gnome version 1.0 or 1.2, i spent a lot of time comparing gnome to kde. i really liked how everything in kde worked together and how it felt like a complete, well-designed environment. but i still used gnome instead, because before that i had used enlightenment and before that afterstep, and i was used to being able to configure every little thing about how my desktop behaved. kde just didn't give me the flexibility to set up my environment the way I wanted it to work. And on top of that, i just preferred the way gnome looked.

Some years have passed since then, of course. KDE has been improving dramatically, adding tons of ways to configure how you use it, while still keeping the feel of a unified environment. Gnome on the other hand seems like it's going full speed reverse. Every release they've removed options, made it dumber, and made only marginal improvements in making it work together as an environment. It still looks nice, compared to KDE, but even there the difference is minimal.

The problem is that both groups are trying to prodice a product so that any idiot can use linux. And ever since Gnome decided to leave behind the people who like to have some control over how their desktop works, i've been using sawfish with an old gnome panel sitting around wondering whether the enlightenment team will ever produce anything new in a usable state.

Actually, what really bugs me about gnome is the "you'll need it all" mindset. I don't want gnome itself, but I do want some of the applications (gnumeric, abiword, ...).

Building just enough of gnome to get there becomes harder with each release. And that's before the "hide all of the useful config options" mindset applied to the ui. e.g. in abiword I want an arbitrary size applied to a document, used to be "overkey the percentage", now it's hidden away. Now, kde is a breeze to build. Everything packaged up into a few large parts. Even the koffice applications build easily. RANT With gnome you really have to work to find what is actually needed - lots of things will build, but fail to run correctly because some obscure prerequisite isn't there, e.g. gnumeric help needs yelp which needs scrollkeeper.

Then upgrade from gnome 2.4 to gnome 2.6 and suddenly there are a load more undocumented dependencies which stop it working. Gimme the days when ./configure would tell you all of the missing requirements. /RANT.

I liked Gnome 2.4 a lot better than 2.6. Spacial Nautilus opens up a new window for every folder that you open. This is unbelieveably annoying. At least Windows 95 had an option in the preferences menu that would let you browse in the same window. Couldn't the Nautilus developers learn anything from that?

Luckily after some experimentation I found a way to get Nautilus to let you browse in the same window. Run gconf-editor. Go to /apps/nautilus/preferences and check off 'always_use_broswer'. Now your Nautilus will work the old way. It's stupid that they don't have this in the preferences menu though.

In case you missed it, it says clearly in the line just beneth the headline:

Opinion by Nicholas Petreley

While I must say that I have not tested GNOME 2.6 yet and so am not in a position to critique, I think he is entitled to an opinion, even if some people might not share it.

The Petreley article is complete trash. The first paragraph alone makes that rather clear, and the past articles by the same author also make it clear. This guy takes every chance he gets to insult GNOME.

Petreley's comments may be inflammatory, but in the long run, the comments will be good for GNOME.

Nothing like some harsh criticism about something you worked hard on to make you work even harder.

You have to have thick skin to be an open source developer. I don't know how they do it sometimes.

Jorge's rebuttal mainly focuses on attacking Petreley's understanding of "spatial browser".

Problem: he never used the word "spatial".

Also, when Petreley complains that you need to edit GConf to change the default behavior, instead of finding a prominent checkbox, Jorge (a) lists 3 ways to change the current behavior, and (b) attack's Petreley's technical understanding of GConf. He says that aside from GUI, GConf is nothing like the Windows registry. Well guess what? From the end-user's perspective, the GUI all that matters! If you need to use Registry or GConf to alter a setting, then it's impossible to call that setting easy-to-change.

The Petreley oped comes down to a very simple position: when a piece of software first gets a radically different, optional interaction mode, common-sense dictates that the new mode should be OFF by default. To do otherwise will scare users who were accustomed to the existing behavior. (Or at minimum, the checkbox to "Act like the older version" should be prominently placed, such as an option at install)

PS. An additional funny part is that both Nick and Jorge manage to mistate what the motivation for GNOME was: Nick says "freedom from Windows", Jorge says "kickass desktop"... when in reality it was meant for "freedom from KDE" (as is well-documented historically)

Petreley hasn't quite figured out that the GNOME v. KDE flamewars are dead yet.

Glad to see so much interest in one of our columns :-)
For the record, this column appeared on page 30 of Computerworld's print edition this week, on the last page of our Technology section. Nicholas Petreley is one of several different columnists who rotate writing for that Tech opinion page. (There is an opinion column on the last page of the print publication's Management section as well.)

Our print readers have seen quite a bit of coverage of Linux and open source in addition to this column. Two weeks ago, for example, one of our cover features was A Sunny Forecast For Open Source, about how weather.com has cut IT costs by one-third after moving away from proprietary software and hardware. It was one of the most-read stories on our site that week.

Sharon Machlis
Online Managing Editor
Computerworld

Mr. Petreley claims that Free Software is about choice, and that by removing options we're taking away choice. This is obviously BS (he has the choice to run KDE :) but beyond that and I think just as importantly, Free Software is about being for /everyone/- if Free Software is a moral right, it is a moral right for my mom and dad too, not just geeks like us. That is an important reason why we translate our software; it is an important reason why we're working on a11y; and an important reason we believe in usability. If he wants to constrain free software to the very geeky 2% of the population, that's fine, but we want free software to be for everyone, and that means designing with usability in mind- which can in many cases mean making choices.