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No GNOME For Solaris 9
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Oct 15, 2001 10:14 PM
from the bad-news-for-the-boys-of-gnome dept.
from the bad-news-for-the-boys-of-gnome dept.
Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."
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Damn (Score:1, Informative)
Does Solaris Need Gnome? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome? (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran around running my Linux cross-compile benchmark [mac.com] on a bunch of Sparcs. The 1G RAM, 440MHz Ultra 10 checked in with performance that was strictly worse than the 320M 450MHz iMac DV+. The 500MHz Blade 100 was around 10% better. Now, these figures are probably a tad low; I realized after the fact I was using an SMP-enabled kernel, and that adds overhead even on a single-processor machine. So credit them with another 10% until I get publish-worthy numbers. The Sparcs are still crushed by the 733MHz P3 el-cheapo Dell Optiplex, and the (badly-configured) Athlon 1200 has nothing to fear.
The Blade 1000 is a different beast. It's a real workstation, with 8M caches---can't get that in the beige box x86 world, and there are a lot of workloads that are just screaming for it. I don't have numbers yet, but I expect they'll be much more competitive. Of course, for $15-20k for a dual processor box, they'd better be.
So why buy a Blade 100?
By the way, newer kernels improved the Mac performance substantially, and SMP provided around a 60% speedup on the tests on the dual 533MHz PPC. I think I know where to borrow a dual 800MHz PowerMac, which should finally beat the crap out of the Athlon 1200. Of course, now I'm curious about dual Athlon performance, but I dunno if I really need a new machine just to run some benchmarks...
No, no, no (Score:2)
No story here.
Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Already been answered... (Score:4, Informative)
That would make no commercial sense for Sun. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun would have to get a transferable binary license for Qt on Solaris, but even then, they'd be the only UNIX vendor standardizing on Qt. Or, Sun would have to buy TrollTech outright, likely to be an expensive proposition.
Sticking with Motif makes sense: it's very widely used commercially (far more than Qt), there are lots of widgets and tools for it, it is a de-facto standard, and Sun already has rights to it. There are also several C++-based APIs for Motif. (Technically, I think Qt and Motif is a toss-up, but that's another matter.)
Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun. (Score:5, Insightful)
Third party: "Hello, Sun? We like your operating system and would like to modify our application to fully intigrate with it."
Sun: "It is GPL."
Third Party: "But our application is commercial. Can't we link to the underlying libraries without being affected by the GPL."
Sun: "No, you can't do that, that would require the LGPL, like what Gtk has."
Third Party: "Why isn't Qt LGPL?"
Sun: "Because it is owned by Troll Tech. They charge flat fees for commerical development. You will have to contact them to find out the costs for developing commercial apps which take advantage of our GUI."
Third party: "What's to stop them from charging royalties in the future?"
Sun: "Nothing."
Third party: "uhhh... Thanks, bye."
This IMHO, is why Gnome has all the commercial support, and no matter how technically superior KDE is, as long as Troll Tech controls commercial development for the GUI, KDE will always be a fringe desktop environment.... even if that means that Linux never makes it to the desktop.
Just like Sun decided, the only option was their old GUI was CDE or Gnome.
Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:4, Insightful)
Disappointed (Score:1)
As a big fan of Solaris I've been looking forward to this release, but come on, CDE is a donkey. It's one of the worst interfaces I've ever used.
Sorry, just had to blow off some steam. My hatred for CDE runs deep
Re:Disappointed (Score:5, Informative)
Try the Ximian packaging (www.ximian.com). It's quite a bit better. I still don't like everything about it, but it's a hell of a lot better than Sun's packaging. If you're going to evaluate Gnome, give it a fair shot.
Does anyone see a troll? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does anyone see a troll? (Score:4, Informative)
An aside to you CDE-haters: it's not how pretty the desktop is, it's all about the function. CDE stands for "Common Desktop Interface", and it's true that one can go from a Sun to an HP to an IRIX box, and, using CDE, be productive on each platform. I've been there.
I find it Ironic... (Score:1)
I know this is not so... (Score:2, Interesting)
Gnome's leader Miguel de Icaza is currently having a flirtation with Microsoft's C# technologies and is producing a Linux version of the stuff under an open source initiative called the Mono Project. ?
Or could this be a hint from Sun, to ignore MS C# (and MONO)or GNOME will wither an die a slow agonising death? After all, doesn't Sun now offer an alternative to Passport, and so
Just a thought.
Have you seen the download page for Sol 9? (Score:1)
That's the problem with open source software... (Score:1)
Do we Really Need Gnome? (Score:2, Insightful)
call me a troll, but isint this one of the bigest complaints about win2k, it has a bloated gui that eats resources better left for runing services on a server.
cde isnt pretty, but it does the job, and doesnt eat alot of resourses.
yes i know sun is offering a choice of desktops, but gnomes lack of inclusion really doesnt seem like a big loss to me..
Re:Do we Really Need Gnome? (Score:4, Insightful)
"do we need all that prettyness and niceness eating cpu cycles on a webserver?"
If Sun ever wants to compete with Microsoft's point-and-click server GUI, the answer is a wholehearted YES. That's the big reason why Sun bought Cobalt [cobalt.com]... they needed a server with a point-and-click interface. Think about it: as a small business owner with 3 employees, none of whom are very technical, which solution would you buy? A solution that requires you to keep a UNIX sysadmin at least part-time, or a system that allows your secretary to set up distribution lists in her spare time by going to a website? The second group is what Microsoft markets to, and Sun needs an offering that can compete. That's why they are simplifying things with web-based tools and now with GNOME.
Major blow to unix (Score:1)
5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete (Score:3, Informative)
What kind of crack are you smoking? (Score:4, Troll)
1. Bonobo has been out for a while now and used as the core of Evolution, Gide, Dev Help, Nautilus and many others... ever wonder why Open Office is intergrating with Bonobo?
2. nope, no such recomendation at that link. May I remind you that Galeon just won an award for the best linux browser? [slashdot.org]
3. Absolute unsubstantiated bullshit.
4. I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves:
KDE [kde-look.org]
GNOME [musichall.cz]
5. Hurd [gnu.org] was started in 1990, before linux, further more, the GNOME people are not employed by Gnu and are associated only substantially by name.
G/K are here to stay, deal with it.
Very Sloppy (Score:2, Informative)
Finally, for those of you who have closely followed Sun's plans for Gnome, Sun has never once claimed that Gnome 2.0 would be a part of Solaris 9. Sun's Gnome site [sun.com] provides Gnome 1.4 as a "reference implementation", and says that Gnome will be the foundation of its future desktop. According to the site, "The next major release, GNOME 2.x, is expected in mid-2002".
Too Bad (Score:1)
Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Rant) (Score:3, Insightful)
Gnome is not ready to go into Solaris. Or Red Hat. Or SuSE. In my experience Gnome was a dysfuntional, unstable pig of a desktop, full of garbage apps were a pain to use and rarely worked correctly. I eventually gave up and switched to KDE, which seems to have only two real advantages over Gnome, Konquerer, and a cute error window to let me know about all of the segmentation faults that the newest so called "stable" release of KDE seems to bring up repeatedly when I try to use Konquerer.
Crap like that might cut it in the world of free software geeks, but it has no place in the world of serious UNIX servers. Sun manages to sell their slow, overpriced hardware because people want stability - not flashy desktops that come with more half finished applications than any Windows install.
And yet the Open-Source world continues to rally around Gnome and KDE, proclaiming them to be saviors of the Linux desktop, when in truth those same programs are likely to help keep Linux off the desktop of people who want a computer that works - and not just a klude of annoying junk smushed together into a monstrosity that makes me realize why Apple's simple OS X/Aqua desktop has captured my computing soul in a way that nothing has since my father would lug his computer home from work and let me play Pac-Man on it.
Gnome and KDE, whatever. Just give me a stable enlightenment with a few nice themes, StarOffice 5.2 (Like a rock, baby!), and keep the silly mess that is Gnome/KDE in the gutter with the rest of the trash.
Slashdot Portal (Score:2)
BTW, skip gnome/kde use icewm [sourceforge.net]
CDE (Score:2, Interesting)
Check the mailing lists (Score:5, Informative)
As I've read some of the mailing lists every day for the past few weeks, there seems to be MAJOR activity by SUN on GNOME. Sander, Billh, Calum, and Stephen (sorry if I missed people!) are very active on the mailing lists. The Accessability Toolkit has been part of their work, but also in drafting some rather encouraging style guides and documentation, along with general hacking on various libraries and applications (including Nautilus, which was pronounced dead after Eazel went boom...). I seriously doubt they plan to drop GNOME, as I seriously doubt Solaris 9 will ship without it, considering the work they are putting into it. The DEVELOPMENT platform should be out by Christmas, with other applications ported soon afterwards.
And, for a better question, why would Sun want to pay TT for a licence for QT? Redhat? Why would any company want to pay for a widget set to develop (closed-source, mind you) for Linux? If a Symantec, IBM, Intuit, or, GASP, even M$ wanted to write Linux software, my guess is they would use an LGPL library (Gnome) over paying for QT licences. (I could be wrong, as I don't pay much attention to KDE, but their FAQ seem to say I'm not...)
Which brings me to the main point I'd like to make, IT'S BEEN ALL ABOUT THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE PAST YEAR!!! It takes a lot of behind the scenes work for a program such as Evolution to work, so that's what the Gnomers have been hacking on. The problem is, YOU (the user) won't see it right away!
The technologies these guys have been busting their arses on will make the applications (like Evolution already proves) kick butt.
GConf - Consolidated configuration system with multiple backends. XML or BerkleyDB for user now, hopefully ACAP or LDAP for network users soon. Who know's what's next!
ATK - Accessability Toolkit for screenreaders and such, built-in to the platform. This is important for corporate use with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in US, and I'm sure others outside the US.
Bonobo - Corba based REAL components, not just OLE. Look at the power in Evolution. (I'm a big fan, as if you couldn't tell, but not just for myself, but for my wife and grandmother as well. I don't think mutt would cut it for them... :>)
Pango - i18n and l10n, Right-to-Left, and such... Don't know much about this being an en-us, but I'm sure it's important!
Glib/Gtk+ - Very nice improvements, Anti-Aliased text, and so forth.
Nautilus - Darin and others have been optimizing and working out the bugs in this for a while. It has it's problems on the bleeding edge, but it's comming along! I'm not sure about the extent of his involvment, but tigert has been showing up on the list. If he is working on it, we can expect quite a bit in the way of jaw-dropping eye-candy...
Glade/libglade/bonoboui(?) - XML UI descriptions at runtime. RAD UI development at it's best... This is very important.
GStreamer - While not Gnome platform, per se, it has ALOT of infrastructure in place in the A/V dept, and once ported to 2.0, will make for a nice multimedia API/Application Toolkit. (If memory serves correctly, it's been a while since I checked up on this one...)
And a plethora of other platform tidbits. Sure, YOU (user) won't see any radical differences between 1.4 and 2.0, other than AA text and such, but just wait until 2.0.1, 2.2, or 3.0, and so on. It took YEARS for the infrastrucure of Linux to become what it is. Now, it is proven solid. The infrastructure of Gnome is REALLY fleshing out. And need I remind you of the 1.0 - 1.2 hurdle... I imagine 2.0 will come out with eveyone trashing it, much like 1.0, then 2.2 come along with much the same reception 1.2 had... Sure, not good for PR, but... :>
NOT that this takes anything away from KDE. Infact, it's what I recommend to my non-developer friends. To my developer and/or sysadmin friends, I show the horsepower under Gnome's hood. So far I've had nothing but ooos and ahhhs from both camps. Later, I'm sure I'll be showing Gnome all-around.
And finally, CUT THAT "GNOME'S DYING" CRAP OUT! Not only does two projects not hurt, it HELPS! We need all the competition we can get, because that's what causes innovation! We've all seen M$ resting on their laurels, because they've had no competition! WE DON'T WANT THAT! And aside from some notable exceptions, the DEVELOPERS OF BOTH PROJECTS SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THIS!!! Take a look at this happy bday congratz to KDE on Gnome News [gnome.org] and PLEASE, BE THANKFUL TO EVERYONE.
For my part, thanks Havoc, Owen, Michael, Seth, Darin, Sather, Ian, Jacob, Alex, Maciej, Calum, Bill, George, Chema, and all I've left out for your hard work. Don't let the ignorance of a few make you at all hesitant in your work. It is greatly appreciated!
Chris
change is good, but keep offering CDE (Score:3, Interesting)
I support change, so please bring on GNOME and/or KDE and attempt to make them better. But please keep CDE and Motif for those of us that don't want the 'latest and greatest'. Patch a few of CDE's major memory leaks and I'll be a happy, content user.
No Gnome == Good News (Score:1)
Do we need a Solaris 9 right away? (Score:2, Insightful)
SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8) brought us... nothing too special. And 5.9 (Solaris 9)? Even less.
I don't really understand why Sun didn't just make a "Solaris 7.1, Solaris 7.5, and Solaris 7.6" before going to 8. Maybe it's because I've never been much of a numbers game fan.
If there's a sliver lining in all this, perhaps it's that SunOS 5.8 was the last to support the Sun4m architecture (SPARCstation 10 and SPARCstation 20), no more upgrading for those old machines of mine. Not that I would need to anyway, they're happily running 5.7.
Sun should use Java (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Sun's OS group seems blissfully disconnected from their Java side; in fact, their OS group seems stuck in the C-mindset of the traditional BSD/UNIX world. And Sun's Java group seems more focussed on Windows than on adding value to Sun's own product line. Sun's lack of coordination and their lack of in-house and open source application development in Java gives people the impression that Java isn't ready. That may have been true two years ago, but today, Java is more than up to the task of building a zippy desktop with a footprint smaller than either Gnome or KDE.
Of course, Sun can't give up completely on C/C++ toolkits, but they have that pretty well covered with Motif and its C++ wrappers, tools that are still much more widely used among Sun's customers than either Gtk+ or Qt.
Sun always seemed like Sun's worst enemy. They need a little of that Gates/Ballmer top-down coherent management and energy. McNealy barks a lot, but he doesn't seem to bite much.
Sun was optimistic. So were we(the OSS supporters) (Score:1)
I happen to use Gnome, and have grown quite accustomed to it, but I still keep many terminals around to get things done. When I used CDE on Solaris in the past, I did the same thing, probably to a greater degree.
I tried to use KDE 2.2.x this past week, and I couldn't get accustomed to it. Perhaps I'm not European enough
Either way, though, the Unix desktop doesn't have a prayer. Sun was just commerical support that could substantiated Gnome as a major desktop force.
Ultimately, the Unix desktop feels too disjoint - which doesn't matter to people like me to want to poke around with the system, but matters to anyone new to Unix. The one advantage the Windows desktop has is how tightly integrated the GUI feels to the OS itself. You need to at least create that illusion in the Unix world - and so far it still seems like something that we aren't even close to acheiving.
On a final note, a consistent widget set across applications gives users a much more cohesive-feeling experience. It may seem silly to a lot of us, but the fact that Windows/Mac apps all "look the same" makes things feel "normal" for a lot of users.
We are very happy to hear this (Score:2)
We have long espoused freedom for gnomes, especially those which live in gardens, and feel that any act of liberation for them is a good thing.
While we are aware that GNOME is quite different, and not a GUI in the same way that a Gnome is not a Dwarf, the happy news that someone supports liberation for GNOME is quite marvelous.
Vive les nains de jardin libre! Et les genies des ordinateurs aussi!
I seriously don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen such a huge amount of trolls getting modded up with insightful before. Is this just because the average Slashdot-user is a KDE-fan, or do you seriously think these deserve insightful:
1. Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Rant) (Score:4, Insightful): (..)"In my experience Gnome was a dysfuntional, unstable pig of a desktop, full of garbage apps were a pain to use and rarely worked correctly"(..)
Constructive criticism is always good, this is just trashing, which I cannot understand, having tried out CDE.
2. 5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete (Score:3, Insightful) (..)"GNOME is based on the GTK+ library, which was fine for its day, but is now decidedly outdated. (..)It doesn't offer exciting components like KParts, KDE's analog to COM. The closes thing to that will be Bonobo, but its development is far behind even GNOME 2's release schedule and won't make it in until at least 2003."(..)
First. GTK+ still works fine, besides there might be a reason why GNOME 2.0 will be using GTK+ 2.0 instead of GTK+ 1.2. Second. Qt doesn't offer KParts, KDE does. GTK+ does not offer Bonobo, Gnome does. Besides Bonobo is already out in stable versions, and has been used extensively by Nautilus, Evolution and Gnumeric.
3. Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:4, Insightful): "Why does Sun continue to ignore KDE as a viable alternative to GNOME. KDE is very mature and incredibly stable. I don't see why Sun doesn't just go forward with packaging it with Solaris. Do they stick with GNOME because it's built on a 100% free toolkit? What's the driving force? As far as I can see, KDE is a solution to many of the problems Sun's UI trials of GNOME came up with. It just doesn't make sense... for one thing, if they want easy of use, KDE is much nicer than GNOME, IMHO."
This is not so much of a troll, as uninformed, and I don't object much to the posting, I object to it being modded up to heaven just because the crowd loves KDE.
I realize being objective is hard when you have a situation like this, but please don't just mod up people because you agree. Mod people because they argue well and have thoughtful and well written comments.
What GTK+ port? (Score:1)
What GTK+ port?  IIRC, they are going to make OpenOffice into a Bonobo component so that it can be embeded in a Bonobo container.  That componentization does not mean a GTK+ widget interface for OO...
Nice troll...
Who are LinuxGram? (Score:2)
From the front page:
- IBM hasn't made any major open source announcements for several months.
- The Free Lunch crowd is against reasonable and nondiscriminatory licenses.
- Sun drops Gnome from Solaris 9.
I'd put a lot more trust in the last rumor, if it wasn't posted together with the first two exacmples of LinuxGram profesionally reported hard facts.
Gnome is available for Solaris already (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.sun.com/gnome
They should include FLWM (Score:1, Flamebait)
And no CDE for this Solaris user (Score:2)
I've run Sun desktops for years.
And I'm still using fvwm2 because I don't like the bloat of CDE. It was especially bad in the early years when it first came out and the hardware SPARCStation 2's and 10's was not as fast as it is now.
Now, with the hardware capabable, I'm hoping to use either Gnome or KDE, just because it seems like more development is occurring for those environments than for CDE.
It's too bad Gnome won't be coming with Solaris 9.
Over the next month I'll bring up an Athlon system as soon as I can buy SuSE 7.3. I suspect that for desktop applications it will suit me better. Then, if I really need a Solaris app, I'll run it over X from the server.
Except for the OpenGL based stuff...hmmm.
Who needs a desktop environment (Score:1)
I keep going back to Blackbox everytime I try a new "Desktop Environment".
Re:no offense but... (Score:1)
Re:Face it, GNOME is dead. (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, this should not in anyway be taken as a knock against anyone who use/develop/etc KDE, just those who feel the need to bash the alternative.
Re:no offense but... (Score:1, Informative)
Finally, on a grammatical note, please refrain from refering to Gnome as 'they'. Gnome is a desktop environment and should clearly be referred to in a singular sense.
On my personal preference, use the word very rather than really. If you do, then you'll sound twice as intelligent as you currently do.
I'm just trying to improve the quality of Slashdot with this post, so please don't mod me into oblivion.
Re:yes, GNOME _is_ dead (Score:1)
Yes, united behind what you want....
Re:Good. (Score:2)
Re:no offense but... (Score:1, Troll)
That leaves Sun. Having GNOME be the default desktop on Solaris was supposed to be a big thing, but now Sun seems to be walking away from that too. Maybe they finally realized that people buy Solaris for reasons other than a friendly desktop environment. I mean, if they managed to get by for the last five years on a partially broken implementation of the Worst Desktop Ever (TM), not shipping GNOME is probably not going to hurt them. Besides, their primary competitors ship with the same or worse crap, and anybody who cares installs another WM.
So where does that leave GNOME? In the crapper is my guess. I think GTK will live on for a while, but the rest of GNOME is going to die off. If Red Hat and Ximian don't care enough to concentrate their effort on GNOME, who does? At this point, GNOME only has a few advantages left over KDE: prettier icons & themes, better office apps (Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, etc.), and a smaller memory footprint. But at the rate KDE is progressing, GNOME is going to be eating dust before long.
Porting not an option (Score:2, Insightful)
GNOME has bindings for any language somebody liked enough to add support for. Got some C code you want to port to KDE? Delete it and start over, it would probably be faster. And what about the dozen or so 'lesser' languages? Even less likely.
And that is why GNOME will eventually win out. C++ is supported so any KDE app can potentially port but only a small subset of GNOME apps can migrate in the other direction.
Diversity usually beats a monoculture even though the monoculture often excels in a couple of areas.
Re:Good. (Score:2)
And, yes, Nautilus is bloated. But you don't need Nautilus, as you almost surely know how to use the command line faster anyway. So just don't run Nautilus.
While there's no doubt usability problems with Gnome, if you use it some you'll get along just fine. IMO, there's not much reason to be running either on a server.
Re:Good. (Score:1)
Why are you running X-Windows, period, on your database and web server(s)? Division of labor, man. Save the UI (and its inherent overhead) for the end-user workstations. And yes, if the machine is truly an end-user workstation, you're allowed to spend a hideous amount of CPU + memory on the UI. Older versions of the MacOS spent 100% of the CPU on rendering the menu anytime you clicked on the menu bar. Nobody, except for the people that were trying to run background tasks (very few and far between in the Mac world), seemed to mind.
I suppose there's an alternative to my question-- why are you running core services on end-user workstations? That's asking for trouble in my book. Workstations are subject to the whims of users; servers should not be.
As for GNOME not shipping with Solaris 9-- I find that somewhat disappointing. Most of my Linux users (on their workstations) seem to prefer GNOME to KDE. It'd be nice to have the choice.
Re:Good. (Score:1)
<BR>
<BR>1% CPU on one processor
<BR>4% on the other
<BR>
<BR>I have VMWare running Win2k Advanced Server in my other window with 512 megs RAM total in the box and Evolution Beta 0.16.99 and Galeon to type in slashdot. Gnome 1.4 w/Sawfish & Nautilus drawing the background (I like Verdana for my desktop fonts); lotsa applets in the panels & gkrellm.
<BR>
<BR>cat
<BR>
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
<BR>Mem: 526299136 521420800 4878336 0 4407296 255361024
<BR>Swap: 526409728 3760128 522649600
<BR>MemTotal: 513964 kB
<BR>MemFree: 4764 kB
<BR>MemShared: kB
<BR>Buffers: 4304 kB
<BR>Cached: 248456 kB
<BR>SwapCached: 920 kB
<BR>Active: 84472 kB
<BR>Inactive: 169208 kB
<BR>HighTotal: kB
<BR>HighFree: 0 kB
<BR>LowTotal: 513964 kB
<BR>LowFree: 4764 kB
<BR>SwapTotal: 514072 kB
<BR>
<BR>Looks okay so far. Let's check load average...
<BR>cat
<BR>0.08 0.05 0.01 1/83 5268
<BR>
<BR>Wow, looks good!
<BR>
<BR>Looks to me like the troll should go back under the bridge...
<BR>
<BR>
Re:Good. (Score:1)
As for gnome 1.4, maybe something is horribly wrong on whatever compiler was used for your package, but I run it daily and I don't have constant CPU usuage. I've never seen anyone who did have constant CPU usuage from it. Well, ther eis the fact that you're running nautilus, but it begs the question: why? I don't think that anyone has represented nautilus as being close to ready for real use. And what were you using it for? there are plenty of graphical file managers, including gmc - the gnome standard one.
And if you find the gnome interface difficult to navigate, then either you're completely braindead or are just so used to some particular interface that you think that anything that isn't that interface is hard.
I'm sorry that I'm in a bad mood and as a result my comments are sounding harsher than I mean them to, but basically your post is either a fairly well devised troll or a bunch of stupid drivel. In the off chance that it's the later (this being
Troll alert (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Gnome will never die (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good. (Score:1)
If you want a fast manager run twm.
Re:Good. (Score:1)
Second of all, remember that if your system is doing nothing, it is very generous to processes that would otherwise do nothing. From what you say, it sounds like some kind of network access or other runaway process is taking up your CPU time. Check your mpstat, your netstat -i, etc. to look at your bottlenecks. You could have some combination problem going on that causes a performance problem when two things are running at the same time.
As for comparison of HP's VUE (excuse me, CDE,) to GNOME, a lot of that is personal preference and habit. I used HP VUE prior to CDE coming out, and then switched to CDE and found the differences relatively minimal, even in the config files. I use GNOME at home, my wife uses KDE. My major complaint about GNOME is that I prefer the old xterm to ANY of the newer terminals I've used. (Get rid of those stupid menus, and give me back the xterm scroll bar, complete with the "strange" mouse control.) CDE's pager is mildly annoying to me, but that's because the first pager I used was similar in style to the one in FVWM and GNOME rather than CDE.
CDE is dead because of a squabble between the major CDE "partners". Ever try to get HP's CDE and Sun's version to cooperate? It's effectively impossible. The two sides are squabbling so much that CDE has not fundamentally changed since 1996 so far as I can see. It is clear that something needs to be offered soon to desktop users soon with proper commercial support. Maybe GNOME isn't the right answer yet with nautilus. (I prefer gmc myself for what little I use a file manager for.) But something does need to be done.
Ximian Gnome on Solaris is good (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, I run Ximian Gnome on my Solaris Ultra 5 (Solaris 8) workstation (slow processor, lots of RAM). Ximian Gnome is great! For most applications, Ximian Gnome is *faster* then CDE, and it's suite of utilities is much more useful then the kruft that comes with the generic Solaris workstation install. I work in a Solaris/Windows office, and often need apps like Gnumeric/Abiword or Star Office.
Gnome on my office-workstation is not as fast as on my cheap home computer (Celeron 366, 128 Mb ram, RH 7.1), but it is perfectly usable.
Most of the slowness seems to stem from the OpenWin server + Video Card itself (slow drawing of boxes, lines, etc). Certain apps like XMMS and Mozilla are slow (but those aren't Gnome apps). Nautilus is crappy slow on Solaris, so i turned it off and use GMC.
Re:yes, GNOME _is_ dead (Score:1)
Re:Good. (Score:2)
Plus you have a more consistant Desktop to work with. Just 1 on the laptop. So you can have your mp3s, background of the playmate of the month, ICQ/yahoo messenger, etc all without worrying what other people are doing to the servers with your stuff on it.
I hate almost every UNIX desktop i've ever come across. They always look neat in screenshots, but when i start using them I get so fustrated. Don't get me wrong, UNIX is my favorite OS, but I still feel it belongs on the server.
The only possible success story with a UNIX Desktop that i can see is OS X, but i don't really have the right to comment on it yet as the only exposure I have to it is 5 minutes on a Powerbook Titanium in a store.
Re:Solaris 9!!!! (Score:2)
Kinda reminds me of Waterloo's Maple. For years, simple revisions to Maple V were the current version. Then came Maple 6. Maple 7 followed less than a year later.
Re:no offense but... (Score:1)
Re:Good.- Experiences may differ (Score:1)
And I agree with the poster who was wondering what the @(&* you were thinking running any kind of GUI on a workhorse server? Repeat after me, "GUI's do NOT belong on servers"!
Re:Sun should stick with CDE... (Score:2)
Re:I use Ximian GNOME on RH 7.1 (Score:1)
Moderators? (Score:1)
I can not believe that the parent post got the moderation (Score 5: Insightful).
I am sure that he has had some problems with Nautilus bloat (which is a commen problem), but Sawfish bloat is really a stupid comment.
I am also sure that he has grown up on CDE, but to claim that the Gnome interface is clumsy and difficult relative to CDE or Windows for a new user, is just rubbish. Also, one should give Sun credit for working hard on making the Gnome interface more user friendly [gnome.org], something all GUI should have even mind all the time.
But the real troll comment is "GNOME is at least five years away from any sort of maturity". Since we just have celebrated KDE's 5 years birthday, that is one of the least : Insightful comments I have seen in this whole slashdot posting. Talk about not paying attention for the last 10 years.
Moderators, wake up!
Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
What?! On my Linux box, sawfish runs at just a hair over the memory usage of xscreensaver and three times that of ntpd! I think this is more than fair for something that's displaying so many widgets. Are you trying to tell me that CDE's WM is smaller than Sawfish (not counting shared libs, of course). Sawfish was specifically created in response to the ultra-slick, but massively bloated Enlightenment window manager, which Gnome used for some time.
Here are things to do to improve your Gnome performance on any platform:
- Choose a theme for Sawfish and Gtk+ that's light on pixmaps. The "modern" theme for Mozilla is also quite expensive.
- Run in 16-bit display mode, not 24 or 32.
- Don't use a background image. Instead use a gradient (1-pixel-wide tiled pixmap) or a flat color.
- Don't run the gnome-terminal with transparency turned on or with a background pixmap
- Reduce the number of virtual desktops
- Never leave multiple large apps (e.g. abiword, gnumeric, mozilla, etc) running unless you need to. These are all beastly programs that, while they do a lot of useful things, will kill your performance once several are running at once.
Most of this is just the routine memory-conservation that any desktop can benefit from. Gnome gives you a WHOLE LOT of rope, because some users WANT to take advantage of 512MB of RAM to load background pixmaps, pixmap-heavy themes and 6 huge apps!It may also be that the Solaris X server is less efficient about loading pixmaps and such into the card. I know PC display technology can often speed up the user experience quite a bit.
Please (Score:1)