The reason they removed the dual panel option was

Story: McCann: "I am more optimistic about GNOME than I've been in a long time"Total Replies: 21
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tracyanne

Aug 22, 2012
5:55 AM EDT
because when there was only 1 panel, the Copy To and Move To right mouse click context menu items would display but not be usable, thus apparently causing confusion for some users. So the solution was to remove the dual panel functionality, instead of simply removing the Copy To and Move To options when only 1 panel was in use, and reinstate them when both panels were in use.

r_a_trip

Aug 22, 2012
9:49 AM EDT
TA, worse than that. McCann asumes everybody copies their files to the clipboard and then pastes them somewhere else. That is certainly not how I work (most of the time). Drag and drop between the pane and the tree view. Nice, simple and quick.

His replacement for familiar move/copy actions is a "wizard" file dialog. Good for the eternal noob a.k.a. born-dumb-and-never-learned-anything, bad for anyone who doesn't want or need extra visual sugar to slow them down.
Fettoosh

Aug 22, 2012
11:02 AM EDT
Personally, I think some of us are being a little too critical and harsh to the GNOME 3 developers.

They definitely made the big mistake of not keeping GNOME 2 supported and should have made a clear commitment that they aren't going to abandon it. But they had no choice but to get on with the trend and compete against Ubuntu Unity & MS "Metro".

They had to start with clean slate since the code in GNOME 2 wasn't suitable enough as it has been evolving over too many years.

In order to get a working release pretty quickly, they had to drop many of the complicated & sophisticated features. I still believe they eventually will come to their senses and do what KDE did. They will have have multiple interfaces available especially after seeing Mint doing it. Actually, they should have joined forces with Mint to help out and affirm a commitment.

I am not really sure and I could be wrong, but I thing once they get a good working structure, they will be adding most, if not all, of the features and functions that GNOME 2 has. May be we should wait and see how things develop.

Disclaimer: I have always been a KDE user, including the rocky period of KDE 4 development, and never was a steady GNOME user.



tuxchick

Aug 22, 2012
11:27 AM EDT
Fettoosh, the GNOME team have always done this-- as soon as GNOME reaches a usable state, they freak out, throw everything away, and start over. They have this weird idea that no features = usability, and that hiding configurations is intuitive. Ubuntu saved GNOME 2. Before Ubuntu, GNOME 2 was an untidy mess. Ubuntu's implementation was streamlined and useful. I don't know who will save GNOME this time, and don't much care.
gus3

Aug 22, 2012
11:52 AM EDT
Quoting:They have this weird idea that no features = usability
Which is provably wrong:

1. Every program has at least one bug.

2. Every program has at least one superfluous instruction.

Hence, by extension, every program can be reduced to a single instruction that doesn't work.
skelband

Aug 22, 2012
12:20 PM EDT
What Gnome does from now on, I care not. As long as they don't muck up GTK to a point at which MATE can no longer function as it did, Gnome is old news for me.

We're still running MATE at home now and the family barely noticed the change.
CFWhitman

Aug 22, 2012
12:40 PM EDT
I admit that to me all the controversy about Gnome has been so much background noise. I've never been a regular user of Gnome or KDE. I've used both XFCE and Fluxbox a lot. I've used IceWM quite a bit as well. I've also used Openbox, and recently I've tried out E17 for a while. I've used some other things as well, but Gnome and KDE always seemed a bit heavy to me. XFCE walks the line for being too heavy for my taste at times. I've just started considering living in Fluxbox or IceWM again on my laptop for while.

Of course, whatever desktop I want is always only a few clicks away, which is the beauty of Linux for me. (Now I just have to decide the next time I build or rebuild a machine whether I'll continue with Ubuntu Studio, or go back to LMDE with a Liquorix kernel for my real-time desires. Of course, I always keep a Slackware box around somewhere.)
Steven_Rosenber

Aug 22, 2012
8:23 PM EDT
Funny: I didn't know about the F3 "split pane" mode in Nautilus until this debate cropped up. Now I'm using F3 all the time. ALL THE TIME. Wish I knew about it before now, but you can definitely file this under "killer features."
tracyanne

Aug 22, 2012
8:28 PM EDT
Steven, it's should now be filed under Killed Features. It's too confusing for ordinary mortals, either that or the Project leader is unable to think the problem through, and removed the panel to avoid having to give it any more thought.

Actually the article is quite interesting, as it gives us a pretty good picture of the mindset of the GNOME 3 project and it's leadership. All I can say is I'm glad I no longer use GNOME.
Steven_Rosenber

Aug 22, 2012
8:39 PM EDT
It's in the menu as "Extra Pane." Never noticed it ...
helios

Aug 23, 2012
1:51 AM EDT
Yeah, the extra pane is nice but I never understood why the copy to move to feature only listed "home" and "desktop" as destinations. I use this feature a lot. Konq and Dolphin do this right by offering the entire home sub-menu when you click either copy to or move to. Two clicks, one or multiple files are transported. It's short-sighted thinking like this that should have been addressed long ago. I believe SolusOS will be changing this in their fork of Nautilus....Athena. I'm still using SolusOS 1.2 which features the last release of Gnome 2. If SolusOS is around for a while, and hopefully it will be, that's my go-to distro. They've managed to make G3 work and look exactly like G2 but able to use either GTK 2 OR 3 for theming...but the tech runs on GTK 3.

It will be interesting to see the 2.0 release. My entire bafflement is based on why Gnome couldn't do things like this even when 2 was still the feature project. If you ask me, I'd rather return back to Gnome 1.4....but that seems like such a long time ago. You could DO stuff in 1.4. It was a system tweaker's paradise. Gnome 3 reminds me of a PlaySkool toy.
dinotrac

Aug 23, 2012
8:13 AM EDT
So...

Maybe I should view KDE developers in a kinder light. They definitely acted like petulant little children when the world failed to adore their shiny new 4.X toy.

OTOH, they've also made that shiny toy into something people can really use, not to mention giving signs that the've learned to listen along the way and maybe even care a smidge about the user base. Who knows? Maybe they've actually made the leap from being coders to being developers. It might even be time to put KDE on a box that I don't have to rely on and kick the tires for a while.

Fettoosh

Aug 23, 2012
10:11 AM EDT
Quoting:It might even be time to put KDE on a box


You have been saying that for a while @Dino. I am anxious and getting impatient. :-)

You better reserve some time because there is a lot to explore and discover.

number6x

Aug 23, 2012
11:23 AM EDT
Does anyone remember that Barbie doll that talked? You would push the button on her back and she would say 'Math is hard!'. Maybe she's working on gnome now...

"Dual panels are like hard and stuff!"

That seems to be the gnome philosophy as I understand it, based on ramblings I've read and the product decisions I've seen them make. Try it for a few more of their decisions...

- "Choosing configurations is like hard and stuff!"

- "More than one window is like hard and stuff!"

- "Notifications are like hard and stuff!"

- "Menus are like hard and stuff!"

and so on. I think Barbie is in charge of gnome.
Fettoosh

Aug 23, 2012
11:59 AM EDT
May be due to GNOME developers suffering from some sort of fatigue syndrome and need fresh and young gun developers to help out.

number6x

Aug 23, 2012
1:05 PM EDT
Good point Fettoosh.

Of course it is just as likely to be too man young gun developers saying 'Throw out this old junk, let's start with a clean slate.', and they need more fatigued old timers to counter 'Why? It works, it's stable, and users are comfortable with it. Just add improvements and don't throw out success."

I'm sticking with 'Gnome 3: Barbie's in charge!'
patrokov

Aug 23, 2012
10:34 PM EDT
Heck I'm still mad that Dolphin lost Konqueror's ability to split both vertically and horizontally and infinite number of times. Why settle for two panels when you have five...or six? Now I have three tabs with only two panes per tab. WASTE I tell you.
Fettoosh

Aug 23, 2012
11:10 PM EDT
Quoting:Heck I'm still mad that Dolphin lost Konqueror's ability to split both vertically and horizontally


Actually, Dolphin never had window vertical & horizontal splits and you didn't lose Konqueror, so where is the waste? :-)

I agree, Dolphin should have Konqueror's window splits. They are pretty handy, especially when comparing documents, web pages, and directory file lists.

Fettoosh

Aug 23, 2012
11:18 PM EDT
Quoting:Of course it is just as likely to be too man young gun developers saying 'Throw out this old junk, let's start with a clean slate.',


Yeap, that could be it too.

tuxchick

Aug 23, 2012
11:34 PM EDT
Quoting:It's in the menu as "Extra Pane."


And now it's Extra Pain. Free bonus agony!
Steven_Rosenber

Aug 24, 2012
2:28 PM EDT
The article I'm lining to below from H-Online about GNOME was very enlightening. One thread running through the article was that nobody with GNOME was at all excited about working on GNOME 2 anymore. They wanted something new and exciting and paradigm-changing. That's GNOME 3. Users hate change, but developers hate things staying the same. Bit of a dilemma, but in order for the project to keep on living, you've got to keep developers excited and engaged. Or that's the line, anyway.

----------------

GNOME – from abyss to common ground By Richard Hillesley

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GNOME-from-abyss-to-co...
patrokov

Aug 26, 2012
8:19 PM EDT
Quoting:Actually, Dolphin never had window vertical & horizontal splits and you didn't lose Konqueror, so where is the waste? :-)


I lost it because they took some of the file functionality out of konqueror. I could never get my "places" to update in konqueror; only Dolphin. So it was a choice between a file manager without usable shortcuts or a file manager without horizontal splits.

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