GNOME 2: A Year Later
Source: OS News
One year ago I wrote a review of Gnome 2. Some people thought I was harsh, others thought I was fair, point is, I always write what I think and surely Gnome 2.0 didn't have the polish or stability of a .0 release. But one year has passed. Gnome 2.2.1 is out, and I must say one thing: I am starting to get impressed by the effort and the clean interface Gnome 2 is now offering. Update: Screenshots inside.
The area where Gnome excels today is in usability. All its preference panels are following the Gnome HIG, so there is great consistency throughout its included apps. A few things could always be designed a bit better, but because of the whole consistent and non-bloat look, it doesn't make the life of the user any bad.
The absolutely great thing about the HIG on Gnome is that it has won the hearts of all its maintainers, so when people are suggesting applications to become part of the main distribution of Gnome, they are instructed to HIG-ify their applications. It is absolutely imperative that developers read, understand and comply with the HIG as it is for the good of the platform in the long run. I like that. Example of a great-looking application that a non-core developer created with (obviously) lots of care: tsclient.
While there is still no menu-editor for Gnome 2 (the Nautilus one doesn't work with Red Hat Linux 9 by default, and Nautilus is hardly the best way to handle this issue anyway), I must say that the "keep it simple" design of Gnome 2 is what won me over the time. I like simple and to the point UI designs. Bloatware is what I can't handle for more than 10 minutes. Gnome tries to not include more than 10-12 items per menu, as this is the maximum number users can handle "at a glance" (something that is important when considering a good UI). I believe this is the biggest difference with its rival, KDE. KDE tries to offer any possible and conceivable option and they run in the danger of clutter. Gnome instead tries to have good defaults, fewer options: less is more.
