Lately I noticed that there are some of FLOSS that I use that are not included in the standard GNOME. OK some of those are not GPL and I can understand a debate in this issue. However there is one application that changed my habits and experience.
I know this can not done by me but I would suggest the GNOME Community considering including it into GNOME. It might not really follow the GNOME HIG but sure there is a way to work it out. I mean if it the issue of blending it into the GNOME looks and feel, it already does. And as much as GNOME 3.0 is planning to change the users approach and experience to their computer GNOME Do already did that. And they have a very large audience. And if you have not tried it then try it.
So here is an idea:
Instead of Developers always having to propose their FLOSS for GNOME inclusion. Why can’t GNOME create some kind of a team or squad that hunts for potential FLOSS that could be included into GNOME. Inviting the developers to become active within the community, giving them the opportunity to work on a larger scale with a cool community from which on the other side GNOME can only
profit.
@Jon: you are right: I don’t care which language a program is written, but I care how “fast” a program is. I tryed gnome-do and liked it, BUT on my machine (~4 years old) it is slow to load, and when loaded sometimes it takes more than 2 seconds to appear after pressing [win+space]. When I press [alt+F2] I always get the window in less than 1 second.
I think a central part of gnome, like gnome-do may be, should have the best gettable performances, and this, in my experience of simple user, isn’t reachable with Mono.
Hmm this seems like a controversial topic. My problem with gnome do is its not really needed to be included. It would be a waste of space, like compiz. Just wasting cpu time and disk space.
Actually two other questions we should be asking are.
Why isnt thunderbird in gnome and why isnt banshee the defalt media player?
@Matteo: So, the applications elected as core Gnome components are chosen to be the ones with maximum speed? So Evolution is the fastest Mailer? Nautilus is the fastest file manager? Well, at least both are in plain C, so they are by definition ultra-fast, right? Good joke.
And comparing Gnome-Do to [alt+F2] is a funny one, too. A program that doesn’t do much can clearly be fast. The funny thing is that Gnome-Do makes me achive my tasks much faster than [alt+F2], because it actually does a lot of stuff to support me. Even if it takes a second longer to start, it saves me 30 seconds on my task. As I want to get my work done quickly (and my work is not to see a window, but to do stuff), that’s not a bad deal.
@Matteo
I agree with hb – can’t just base things on raw speed. After all the whole point of things like XFCE is to provide that speed because you can’t BOTH provide raw speed and a rich desktop experience. If Gnome was aiming to be one of those then sure, but its not, its aiming to be a full and polished and modern desktop.
On a side not i’m using a 4year old laptop (pentium m 1.8) and alt f2 actually takes longer to open than gnome do (which is instantaneous). And that with effects turned on – Ubuntu ftw!
As for building a better desktop experience, building in Gnome-do would make it possible to have integration with gnome apps by default instead of as bonus extra i.e. something with guarenteed support, could open the door to all sorts of clever innovations.
@Shane – you make a good point: Rhyhmbox and Banshee are identical to the untrained eye, though each one lacks a couple of features that the other has. Why aren’t the development teams merged? Would make sense to me. Although I suspect that would raise yet another mono-hating debate.
@Jon I still think the mono hating debate is mainly fear and not hate. Well the simple fact is if they replace rhythmbox and totem with banshee they would have a full featured media player much like itunes or windows media player. It would make sense because people switching over dont have to learn something stupid like open this in rhythmbox and open this in totem. Plus totem is terrible for users, it doesnt use a library so you have to use nautilus to open the video and that is stupid. Banshee may be new and may use mono and may still be lacking in some areas but its ready to be the default because its simply better than the alternative.
@Shane I wouldn’t ditch totem completely – its nice to have a basic video player handy (plus its used as a firefox plugin and to play DVDs). But i agree most of the anti-mono sentiment seems to be more fear and knee-jerk reaction against something new (and possibly disbelief that MS actually invented something pretty decent).
As for patents etc, like i said there’s boatloads of patents relating to C which no one cares about. Like GCC, Mono is an open source implementation of a standard – ECMA 334 & 335 to be precise, and now includes all sorts of bits that aren’t part of MS’s work (GTK# etc).
In the end it still seems ridiculous to oppose using Gnome-Do based on how its coded rather than how useful it is.
@Jon I wouldnt think it would be useful enough to justify it becoming part of gnome. When you can hit alt+f2 and from there you can open programs. Also you can open programs and documents with alt+f3 through the deskbar applet. I would have no problem with banshee being made the default. Obviously certain things like the browser plugin etc will have to be made but totem isnt as feature rich as is needed in a modern operating system.
Do should be part of Gnome, and thats it
Gnome Do is a good time saver. And I have nothing against mono. I have however problem with the bloat recent years have brought to the Desktop, both Windows and Linux. Even Linus got scared of the bloated kernel. I rely heavily on python and perl, however those we use for administrative tasks, and tasks that take long time. I accept banshee and f-spot, but those don’t sit open all the time and u don’t rely on them for your work. So no I don’t want Do in Gnome, It’s fine as a software you can install if you choose to.
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