"This desktop will change the way people view, work with, and think of the desktop."
I don't want to be a hater, and especially I don't want to disrespect the developers and designers who have put heart and soul in this and probably created some awesome stuff. But hyperbole like this example, and sprinkled elsewhere in the article, really gets my hackles up. I start looking at the pictures skeptically and my inner troll starts growling.
I read that article three times to be sure, and there isn't a damn thing in it I haven't seen at least twice (and for most things, more) in the open source world since about 2005. Including "activity-centric" interface. (Not counting shrinking the desktop so you can put the menu up without covering anything, but "meh".)
Personally my opinion is that until something fundamental changes in the IO devices or the intelligence level of the thing reading the IO devices, we've long since grabbed the low-hanging fruit and quite a bit of the not-so-low-hanging fruit. And most of the changes I see proposed for IO changes are steps back, not forward. (Like a "true 3D desktop", which is a recipe for getting the user lost in new and exciting ways, not wonderful new interface empowerment.) We've grunted what we can grunt in our point & grunt interfaces, we need either real words or more real language.
(Since people may not know this: When I say "point & grunt", it is not intended as a derogatory term per se. What it is intended to illustrate is that the rate at which we can communicate information with a computer is very limited. Point at your computer screen and pretend your finger is the mouse cursor. You can point at anything you want on the screen. Now, you have 1, 2, 3, or at any rate a small number of mouse buttons. That is, you have a grunt, and a different grunt, and on those sophisticated verbose UNIX systems, a third type of grunt, the point being that your mouse click doesn't carry all that much information. Information in the information-theoretic sense; at full blast, I'm lucky to get 10 bits a second into my computer. Try communicating with your coworkers that way all day, and you'll grow to appreciate the limitations. Computers get a lot of out it since we've had decades to learn how to cleverly prompt the user's grunts in such a way to get the most information out of it, but there's just so much we can pull, no matter how clever we are with our menus and UIs, from pointing & grunting.)
The writer of the article is definitely not doing the devs any favors with his over-glowing purple prose. No desktop can live up to that level of hyperbole. Even worse than the bad writing is that there's no way to enlarge those darn screenshots so you can actually see something! Arghh!
I really don't hope that is the future of the desktop. I mean really? Is that what we have to look forward to?
In my world there can be no talk about the future of the desktop unless:
The desktop metaphor and the current filesystem disappears.
My machine starts to monitor what I do and actually use this (The Ghost Protocol)
The machine starts to connect everything I do and build contextual maps automatically. For instance, I receive a picture in my mail and throw it into photoshop. When I then want to retrieve it I can not only look for name.psd but also for the context (Phil send it to me by mail)
Then we can talk about a the future of the desktop.
Why is everyone interested in the filesystem going away? As long as users posses more than 20 files, organizing them is helpful.
Notice one of the most requested features on the Kindle was folders for the user interface. The result they gave us isn't folders, and the actual filesystem is abstracted, but it's effectively the same.
Your point about the system watching what you do and doing something useful with that information reminded me of some work a few years back by Nat Friedman on "Dashboard" that had me pretty excited at the time: http://nat.org/dashboard/
It was a shame to not actually see that go anywhere other than the prototype stage.
Take a look at Zeitgeist and GNOME Activity Journal, which haven't been accepted as modules into GNOME 3.0, but are already usable and will almost certainly be part of the 3.x series in the next few releases.
It does seem like there will be some tentative steps in this direction. But I agree we need to see more - I like your idea of a content-neutral tagging agent that draws inferences based on my use patterns rather than a committee's agreed use cases.
The OLPC's Activity metaphor is basically taking over and, having always loathed desktops and never understood why my computer must simulate a desktop (with all the clutter that implies), I like it.
It's not just GNOME: iPhone, iPad, and Android apps are at their heart the same as activities (the Android API even uses com.android.Activity as the base class for Android apps).
Yes, it struck me that this looks like a desktop version of Android...obviously tweaked to take advantage of the extremely larger screen and available resources.
I am a Gnome user and I am not at all impressed, I liked Gnome because there was 1 way to do a certain task, now they gone the windows way of being able to do the task at many places, that is confusing and complicated. Gnome was simple but complete, but I guess fashion is more important than satisfied users, just like windows and OSX. I am not looking forward to the next fad.
Anybody knows a simple and consistant and complete desktop that I can use when Gnome got screwed?
B.T.W. I expect negative mod points for being viewed as nagger, but it is how I feel about this Gnome route.
Try xfce. It's based on GNOME technologies but is leaner and more minimal. It's often used for low spec machines but is great if you just want a super fast desktop environment that's not too alien/weird.
gnome-shell is just a window manager which replaces metacity. You can continue using GNOME with another window manager. I personally use xmonad with GNOME and won't trade it for anything else.
Workspaces are such an obviously great idea that it astounds me that Windows and Mac OS X still don't have them (I guess Mac OS X has a functional equivalent as of Leopard or Snow Leopard, if you squint right, but I find it less intuitive and I use it less even after months of having it available on my hackintosh). Given that they've been a part of X Windows window managers for a couple of decades, it's just astonishing that they've never made an appearance as a standard feature of other windowing systems.
This, of course, isn't a new feature in GNOME 3, and so I guess it's not really relevant, but I just felt like ranting about the one thing that I think the Linux desktop has always had such a clear lead on, and that until you've used it you don't even know how much it sucks to not have it.
I haven't used GNOME 3 but it sounds like OSX's Spaces are a bit more usable at this point. This article talks about dragging icons around to move applications between spaces -- in OSX you can just drag the window itself independent of the application so you could have a Numbers spreadsheet in Space 1 and another in Space 2. It's based on the window not the application though you can statically bind certain applications to their own space if that works better. Multiple monitor support is nice too. I think I remember using that in GNOME 2 though so I'm sure 3 will support it too.
It's not obvious that they are a good idea in general. One pretty bad issue is that if you don't know about work spaces, then hitting Ctrl-Arrow will have the effect that everything vanishes with no obvious way to get it back.
It's also not clear to me that they actually make people more productive even if they are aware of them and understand them. Of course many nerds feel they are being more productive, but that only indicates that if you wish to sell to nerds, you should include them at least as an option.
Anyone else find this article really useless without being able to see the screen shots in higher resolution? I am interested in the UI improvements, but I won't be told about them. SHOW me.
The real question is: Does it have a feature to exclude certain files from the 'recently accessed files' list? There are many examples where you wouldn't want someone to see some of the files that you recently opened/worked with (i.e. top secret work, porn, whistleblower, etc).
There are two features I'm excited about for Gnome 3 which were not mentioned. Both exist as ideas. Ideas are fragile, delicate things. Attack people, not ideas.
The general idea is that things that pop up in your face are distracting, but notifications are good. Hence, the task pooper. It's a bar of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. You drop files and such into time slots on it, and they pop up again at the end (to either disappear into a filing system after a few seconds or be bumped back a few hours). I vaguely remember hearing something about being able to shove application notifications in it. Additionally, it can boil an egg at thirty paces.
This will never happen, but it would be amazing. No more hunting for arcane menu items in The GIMP; just type "enable indexed color" or whatever. Alas, a strong argument against is would be that it would just encourages sloppy ui design, so I doubt we'll see it any time soon.
I don't see anything revolutionary or extremely interesting and useful here. (a + b) is the same as (b + a). Anyone remembers this link when someone made a prototype of a desktop interface that you could manipulate by all of your 10 fingers? That was truly awesome.
You mean Clayton Millers 10gui concept[1]? Sadly, it seems that this won't become reality for another while yet. Lack of funding and expertise mainly, it seems. A real pity.
Well, looks a bit more slick than Gnome 2, but not revolutionary. Kind of a step towards KDE 4, which was really a step towards MacOS. If they can make it less buggy and more performant than KDE 4 (and... one would hope) then I'm sure I'll enjoy using it.
ps. Seriously, whomever put together this article for Linux.com is inepxerienced enough to embed 1920x1080 images directly into the page, rather than thumbnails?
How is KDE 4 a step toward Mac OS? I don't see that at all. KDE 4 also wanted to revolutionize the desktop, but I think we have accepted at this point that it isn't going to happen. KDE 4 is much more like Windows and KDE 3 than OS X.
So they implement Spotlight search/Windows key search, show tiled desktops like countless other apps for Windows/OSX, and call it the "future of desktop?"
The GNOME people should pay more attention to design, like using better fonts and not drenching the entire screen with dark gray. The next version is just as ugly as the previous ones.
I think that most of it just boils down to terrible typesetting. Even Windows does a better job. I've always felt that this is the #1 contributor to that Linux 'cheap' feel. Everything else looks wonderful, but the fonts look ugly, even the necessary font packages are installed.
If the "Future of the Desktop" still means having to do installs and updates, then I look forward to living in the past. I've even gotten sick of being harangued by Android updates.
After having written code for 20 years, I want zero responsibility for somebody else's code, and that includes doing updates.
I agree that constantly being nagged about updating sucks. What's worse though: update nagging or occasionally having an app or service you depend on breaking temporarily due to a bad update?
If regressions are somewhat rare then I think I prefer automatic updates, even with the risks.
Interesting that, after years of being accused of ripping off the Mac, the new Activities interface looks a lot more like Windows 7 than anything OS X.
I've always said that the Gnome team is more interested in adopting good UI paradigms; this seems to pan that out.
Pretty much anytime someone changes something about a DE interface someone else claims that they're "ripping off OS X", and most of the time it makes no sense whatsoever. I would ignore these people.
So, I kinda got a little too excited when I heard a new desktop.
But then, I have already seen all these concepts pretty much, haven't I?
From what I got form the article, it seems like we will only get a couple of new "shortcuts".
I REALLY am hoping his headline is true, and we do get a new desktop experience at least, when this releases...and I would LOVE it if GNOME surprises me when it comes out and is more than what I think it is.
I sure will give it a try. The author is right when he said people stopped to find gnome innovating.. and this is a genius move from the gnome team.
I hope there will be an easy shell command to use the activity "find". For instance, activity firefox would start it and activity test.py could show me the activity view with all my files named test.py, etc.
Isn't it rather like Microsoft used to be, when they can assume that their sweeping changes will be unquestioningly accepted by everybody, no matter what the final result is like? I thought open source freed us from that. Of course, I'm grumpy that Kubuntu moved to KDE4 by default. I know KDE3 is still available, but c'mon, how could the Kubuntu guys look at KDE3 and KDE4 and decide to ship KDE4 as the default? When I installed Lucid (to give KDE4 yet another try) notifications were sized and stacked illegibly, and I kept losing notifications I didn't want to dismiss. Do a fresh install with default settings, and basically the first movement you see on the screen reveals a major usability problem! Well, it's obvious how that happens -- months before the final product is even scheduled to be finished, distros have already decided when to unleash it on their users.
Gnome never looked anything like XP or MS Windows for that matter. I think you are confusing it with KDE. If anything, Gnome has some similarities with OSX.
[+] [-] rfrey|15 years ago|reply
I don't want to be a hater, and especially I don't want to disrespect the developers and designers who have put heart and soul in this and probably created some awesome stuff. But hyperbole like this example, and sprinkled elsewhere in the article, really gets my hackles up. I start looking at the pictures skeptically and my inner troll starts growling.
[+] [-] jerf|15 years ago|reply
Personally my opinion is that until something fundamental changes in the IO devices or the intelligence level of the thing reading the IO devices, we've long since grabbed the low-hanging fruit and quite a bit of the not-so-low-hanging fruit. And most of the changes I see proposed for IO changes are steps back, not forward. (Like a "true 3D desktop", which is a recipe for getting the user lost in new and exciting ways, not wonderful new interface empowerment.) We've grunted what we can grunt in our point & grunt interfaces, we need either real words or more real language.
(Since people may not know this: When I say "point & grunt", it is not intended as a derogatory term per se. What it is intended to illustrate is that the rate at which we can communicate information with a computer is very limited. Point at your computer screen and pretend your finger is the mouse cursor. You can point at anything you want on the screen. Now, you have 1, 2, 3, or at any rate a small number of mouse buttons. That is, you have a grunt, and a different grunt, and on those sophisticated verbose UNIX systems, a third type of grunt, the point being that your mouse click doesn't carry all that much information. Information in the information-theoretic sense; at full blast, I'm lucky to get 10 bits a second into my computer. Try communicating with your coworkers that way all day, and you'll grow to appreciate the limitations. Computers get a lot of out it since we've had decades to learn how to cleverly prompt the user's grunts in such a way to get the most information out of it, but there's just so much we can pull, no matter how clever we are with our menus and UIs, from pointing & grunting.)
[+] [-] theBobMcCormick|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkulak|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadhome|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|15 years ago|reply
In my world there can be no talk about the future of the desktop unless:
The desktop metaphor and the current filesystem disappears.
My machine starts to monitor what I do and actually use this (The Ghost Protocol)
The machine starts to connect everything I do and build contextual maps automatically. For instance, I receive a picture in my mail and throw it into photoshop. When I then want to retrieve it I can not only look for name.psd but also for the context (Phil send it to me by mail)
Then we can talk about a the future of the desktop.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
Notice one of the most requested features on the Kindle was folders for the user interface. The result they gave us isn't folders, and the actual filesystem is abstracted, but it's effectively the same.
[+] [-] logic|15 years ago|reply
It was a shame to not actually see that go anywhere other than the prototype stage.
[+] [-] angrycoder|15 years ago|reply
Yeah, the last time they tried this it was called Clippy.
[+] [-] mgunes|15 years ago|reply
http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist http://live.gnome.org/GnomeActivityJournal
[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|15 years ago|reply
It's not just GNOME: iPhone, iPad, and Android apps are at their heart the same as activities (the Android API even uses com.android.Activity as the base class for Android apps).
[+] [-] SwellJoe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yaa101|15 years ago|reply
Anybody knows a simple and consistant and complete desktop that I can use when Gnome got screwed?
B.T.W. I expect negative mod points for being viewed as nagger, but it is how I feel about this Gnome route.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexkay|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|15 years ago|reply
This, of course, isn't a new feature in GNOME 3, and so I guess it's not really relevant, but I just felt like ranting about the one thing that I think the Linux desktop has always had such a clear lead on, and that until you've used it you don't even know how much it sucks to not have it.
[+] [-] jsz0|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssp|15 years ago|reply
It's also not clear to me that they actually make people more productive even if they are aware of them and understand them. Of course many nerds feel they are being more productive, but that only indicates that if you wish to sell to nerds, you should include them at least as an option.
[+] [-] rubashov|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SandB0x|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thought_alarm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goosey|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyre|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesgeck0|15 years ago|reply
The first is the "task pooper." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/task-pooper-...
The general idea is that things that pop up in your face are distracting, but notifications are good. Hence, the task pooper. It's a bar of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. You drop files and such into time slots on it, and they pop up again at the end (to either disappear into a filing system after a few seconds or be bumped back a few hours). I vaguely remember hearing something about being able to shove application notifications in it. Additionally, it can boil an egg at thirty paces.
The second is Quicksilver/Launchy/Gnome-Do type functionality integrated at the GTK 3 level. http://www.cimitan.com/blog/2009/01/31/do-ifying-gtk-30/
This will never happen, but it would be amazing. No more hunting for arcane menu items in The GIMP; just type "enable indexed color" or whatever. Alas, a strong argument against is would be that it would just encourages sloppy ui design, so I doubt we'll see it any time soon.
[+] [-] snitko|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkersten|15 years ago|reply
[1] http://10gui.com/ and HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877535
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
ps. Seriously, whomever put together this article for Linux.com is inepxerienced enough to embed 1920x1080 images directly into the page, rather than thumbnails?
[+] [-] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imsky|15 years ago|reply
The GNOME people should pay more attention to design, like using better fonts and not drenching the entire screen with dark gray. The next version is just as ugly as the previous ones.
[+] [-] knarf_navillus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jksmith|15 years ago|reply
After having written code for 20 years, I want zero responsibility for somebody else's code, and that includes doing updates.
[+] [-] goof|15 years ago|reply
If regressions are somewhat rare then I think I prefer automatic updates, even with the risks.
[+] [-] commandar|15 years ago|reply
I've always said that the Gnome team is more interested in adopting good UI paradigms; this seems to pan that out.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atiw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d0m|15 years ago|reply
I hope there will be an easy shell command to use the activity "find". For instance, activity firefox would start it and activity test.py could show me the activity view with all my files named test.py, etc.
[+] [-] logic|15 years ago|reply
[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/FeatureList
[2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbokun|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|15 years ago|reply
Useful? An improvement? Oh heck yes, I like it like that. But this is no future, this is the present, and they're just slightly re-organizing.
Hyperbolic prose, indeed.
[+] [-] tung|15 years ago|reply
> 3. Click the Super key (often referred to as the "Windows" key).
Well, there goes my free unused keyboard shortcut modifier.
[+] [-] pyre|15 years ago|reply