@John: I would myself too add a lot there. Like, default email client to point to Gmail. Open office on menus to change to Google docs. Also, universally working default media player selections are missing. Or, voip/conferencing application (are there sip urls to be handled?).

Seems like a really easy first step. Next would be mime-type handlers for .doc/.xls to online tools like google documents.

But I still love you :-)

Gnome’s KISS philosophy has served it well, if you ask me. Despite the controversy it caused I think the simplification that was done was the right thing to do as it now puts Gnome in a good position to add these sorts of revolutionary features in a sane way. I’m not sure that was forethought or just good luck, but here we are.

However, I do also have to agree with some of Erik’s points, in principle at least. While this visionary stuff is awesome and exciting, there are a still a number of more fundamental things that need attention within Gnome. The printing system comes to mind. My applications work totally inconsistently in how they interact with printers. Evince behaves one way, gedit another. And this is just within the gnome-shipped apps. Once you start adding Firefox and OO.o to the mix the inconsistency gets overwhelming. I consider myself a pretty die-hard Linux/Gnome fan, and even I find it frustrating. I can’t imagine what someone who was “just a user” would think.

Additionally, there are a number of features that users have come to expect that Gnome doesn’t offer out of the box. The first one to come to mind here is the ability to automatically rotate amongst a group of desktop images. Sure, one could install “drapes” (or whatever it’s called…) to achieve that, but that shouldn’t be necessary. I think that if some of these comfort features don’t start showing up in the core of Gnome again, we will lose a large number of potential users. Adding them along with these other web-integration features seems to make a lot of sense.

My own pet peeve is the “desktop searches”.. It’s the DESKTOP part that sucks, many of us have a significant part of everything data already in the networks.. Like Google Docs. And now finding it has become hard, and it requires distinct tools to do several searches to be able to locate anything. Progress, yippiee.

Or how about before these very far out (although cool) scenarios fixing some very basic problem: complete lack of usable collaborating platform. (IM, multi-point stuff, voip at the same, no need to WORRY about it being connected like GAIM which poos on its own feet every time, no worrying about actually running the application or knowing there IS such application.. The integration level and comfort is presently plain rubbish.) Where on earth is my sane and nice telepathy+frontends+connectors installed by default on every desktop and them integrated for that pervasive goodness huh? Pathetic.

I was never too impressed with Enlightenment. It’s fun, sure, lots of glowing and shiny buttons (esp. e17) but everything is just so *heavy* and *fuzzy*. I prefer simple and snappy. Lately, I’ve been very impressed by XFCE, it’s slowly growing more robust while remaining quick and straightforward.

For example, I have never understood why music players need to have an interface entirely unlike anything else on the system (eg. Winamp/xmms). At least now with the current generation ~ Muine, Rhythmbox, Banshee, etc. ~ things look normal and more *usable*.

I definitely agree that if we’re going to start incorporating Clutter, Lowfat, Compiz/Beryl, Pyro, etc. we are going to need a HIG which addresses these interfaces. They need to be standardized and accessible if they are going to be an official part of Gnome. Just doing things because Apple did them isn’t good enough, they need to have a purpose (demoware is not a good reason). Are ideas like iTunes’ coverflow useful? Personally, I prefer just scrolling through a list of albums (Muine) rather than through a 3D flipbook (iTunes), the pictures are good but is there any purpose to making it 3D?

Another concern is *reduced* functionality with increased “bling”. I put my desktops in a 3×3 square so that every desktop has 4 adjacent desktops. Every desktop is home to a separate application (terminal, GEdit/vim, Firefox, Nautilus, Muine, etc) so I can easily switch between them. With Compiz/Beryl, switching between desktops is not only slower but can only be done linearly (as far as I’m aware) so that every desktop only has 2 adjacent desktops. It looks cool but reduces my ability to actually work. 3D file managers (“It’s a Unix system, I know this!”) never caught on because file management (along with most other things) is a bear in 3D.

What is the purpose of these projects? We are putting them out there, saying that if the architecture exists, the projects will come. No offense to Rasterman et al. but there’s a reason Enlightenment isn’t taken seriously and why it’s not popular. Shiny effects aren’t what bring people to the desktop, Vista proved that. “The wow starts now!” wasn’t effective once people realized that things simply didn’t work and were awkward, ugly and confusing when they did.

Project Ridley (“libgnome must die!”) intrigues me more than the new “bling” libraries. I also see Mono as bringing a more pluggable, rapid development, integrated architecture to Gnome if done right (we have to watch the resource consumption and speed on this a *lot*, along with Python now that both are officially used by Gnome). I’m not saying that we need to be XFCE but, as the previous commenter said, “Let’s not lose our heads here.”

Could you update the Soylent link to this one?: http://live.gnome.org/Soylent

“Project Soylent” was the original (somewhat different) idea from a few years ago, and didn’t really go anywhere. So anything related to it is really out-of-date.

-Travis