At London LinuxWorld in October 2006, we had a stand promoting and discussing the GNOME project with visitors. As part of that stand, we collected ideas from people about what they liked and disliked about GNOME. While doing a spot of spring cleaning, I came across the dozens of post-it notes that people had written their suggestions on. Shame on me for not getting round to typing up the suggestions until now, but it actually makes for even more interesting reading to see what features and bugs have already been fixed.
- Browse mode as default
- Desktop search
- GNOME Evolution – pressing space bar marks messages as “read”. Button to go to next unread message
- Good menus
- Good integartion, smooth 🙂
- GNOME-VFS is too specific 🙁
- Software I can use without thinking about it! Love it!
- Need IDE with good debugging support
- Centralised location for editing application associations
- Better thumbnail cache use. e.g. delete thumbs not used for 30 days
- Needs to be more geeky
- GConf on NFS-homed rollhout (universtity) between Solaris/GNOME
- Good – slick system; Bad – missing certain functions
- File save expansion sucks 🙁
- Tabs in nautilus
- GNOME ROS MY SOX
- It’s Free!
- Make windows codecs easier to use and install. WMVs, DVDs, & co, should be a single install tickbox
- Evolution – autosense IMAP/IMAPv4: who the fsck knows what the server is running, or cares?
- Make all desktop configuration scriptable
- Evolution: please implement “Reply and file” (to specific mailbox)
- Memory consumption
- Evolution: (Imap) please replicate locally as the tickbox says!
- (Love) Gstreamer integartion
- Scaling all desktop icons simulatonsusly
- (Love) Inkscape
- Does everything I need
- F-Spot rules
- Keyboard navigation in panel menu
- I like GNOME because cute guys work on the stand
- Configuration of GNOME 🙁
- It actually works! Yay!
- So simple my 9 year old neice can use it! Keep it simple
- It does things my way
- Reset option for panel to restart from scratch
- Easy to install RPMs via Centros
- “Expose” & Just Works
- Why can’t I double click top-left corner to close a window (like Win, KDE, CDE, etc)
- Tomboy notes are cool!
- I (heart) GNOME ‘cos KDE sucxors!
- KDE FTW
- Extremely user friendly
- More examples in developer documentation, e.g. graphics
- Windowing is too chunkey, want more elegenat interface
- No alarm clock?
- Memory footprint. Library precaching
- I like how the menus are organised!
- I want to sync a Palm Tunsten T5
- DVB/T Freeuen card doesn’t work or is not easily configurable in Totem.
- File->open new users want a text field to click in before typing a filename
(Personally, I think number 30 is best)
No mention of thumbnails in the file open dialog? That’s surprising, but I guess that may explain why no one’s bothered to implement it for all these years.
Can you make this a numbered list, so we can refer to them more easily?
“Why can’t I double click top-left corner to close a window”
Answer: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83892
You could, easily, but we choose not to implement it because you can also single-click top right even more easily, and that has no risk of mystifying new users as to why their document has vanished without explanation.
Dear Microsoft,
Please keep spatial mode as the default and remove browser mode altogether! Spatial mode encourages users away from GNOME, The Microsoft-blessed pollutant of free software.
Dude you may think number 30 is the best, but unless it came from the rackspace girls chances are there’s a reason they didn’t want you to notice them writing it!