GNOME 2.6 Good and Bad
Since I installed GNOME 2.6 a few days back (the day it was released actually) I’ve been using it and playing with it. Most of it is good, fast, slick and sleek. Even the spatial browsing, which I wasn’t too keen on when I first tried it, is growing on me. It’s the biggest point of contention about this latest release and I wanted to keep an open mind about it before bitching one way or the other.
The two things that floored me though were a couple of things in the new Nautilus file browser. After unsuccessfully trying to figure it out myself, I emailed the nautilus-list and got a reponse….
My first bitch was that the section on browsing and connecting to network resources doesn’t match the documentation. When reading the docs it says there are things that you should see that just aren’t there. Turns out those docs weren’t updated from the previous release. What?? How the hell did that slip through? With faster better networking being a key feature in this relase, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure that your docs actually match the program that’s released?
The second one was related… the “Connect to server” command lets you mount a remote filesystem quickly and easily. Select “File->Connect to Server…” put in a name and a location (ftp://server, ssh://server, sftp://server, etc) and click OK, and a mounted filesystem will appear on your desktop. Very cool, similar to the way that apple does it under OS/X. So when I try this, except for one strange case, I just get a message saying that “ftp: server” isn’t associated with any action. I figured I’d missed something, needed an extra package installed or something. Nope, turns out it’s a bug. Again, What??? Why was this released with such a huge hole in a new and promoted feature? Don’t get me wrong, I love linux, and GNOME, but bugs like that should be fixed before something is released, especially when this is supposed to be a stable, end-user-ready release.
Time to start learning GTK programming and start submitting patches I guess. I have a bunch of other bitches about GNOME and things that still aren’t fixed from the last release that I’ll post in a bit.
