I tried installing FC4 in VMWare 5 last night, but couldn't get Anaconda to start. The same CD installed fine on my actual desktop, however.

The menu structure you are talking about are all GNOME default. Fedora didn't design and ofcourse they didn't change the order. It's not Fedora design fault. If you want a nice, user friendly Linux, try Ubuntu Linux.

The difference between Preferences and System Settings is that the preferences are user specific, while the settings are global, and require the root password.

Of course, just because there's a rational behind it doesn't mean it's not an arbitrary and annoying distinction :)

arunsub: Fedora most certainly does change the menus in GNOME (and KDE, too). There is no "Desktop" menu in GNOME's default configuration, for example; only "Applications", "Places" and "System". Nor are there separate "Preferences" and "System Settings" menus. There isn't a menu called "System Settings" anywhere in GNOME, actually.

Ubuntu, which you mention, ships GNOME with its default menu structure unchanged.

arunsub: I'm running current Ubuntu and I have most of the same complaints Asa has about the menus. It still amazes me that people just can't seem to get this right. It's still a chaotic mess. Part of me wishes that the FF developers would go and straighten this mess out.

/me plans to slap down *anyone* playing fanboy for any distro (except possibly FC4 because the post is about it, depending on how vocal the specific response is) in this thread, particularly users of the U-word distro because they've been *by far* the most vocally annoying group over the last six months or so.

Erhhmmm. Back on topic...

As far as I understand, the reason for the Preferences/System Settings distinction deals with privileges. Preferences are all user-specific things - things that users can change without affecting all the other users of the computer. System Settings are computer-level settings - there's only one clock for the entire computer, for example. The same goes for most of the hardware-related items, as well as for items that would require the root user to have pre-enabled something (like perhaps language package installations, although at least in FC3 this doesn't actually occur).

I guess the logic for this is to make these setting accessible to all users without requiring them to log in as root. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with this; displaying "broken" (if you don't know the root password) functionality is a no-no, but unnecessarily hiding things by requiring a root login is probably worse.

Actually, what I think you're seeing here is a reflection of the typical Linux user (as much as one even exists, but only in the few ways that matter here) - a more experienced user who shares his computer with only a few other people, all non-experienced. He will always want quick access to root-level settings, so having a top-level menu full of items that only work if you know the root password makes sense for him. System Settings is not a broken menu for him because he knows the password to access the goodies. The other users aren't likely to delve in there, so they don't test the functionality or make much of a fuss when it doesn't work. It's broken for them, but if they never use it anyway it's not *that* broken.

What's the solution here? I don't know. One option might be to create an item titled "System Administration Preferences" in the Preferences menu that just serves as a wrapper around existing System Settings functionality and keeps non-privileged users from trying to change system settings. You could then eliminate the menu that's mostly useless for non-administrator users and is confusingly titled. However, I'm pretty sure the correct idea involves a bit more thought than that and is better specified UI-wise. (Note that currently admin settings are only invoked through menus, but creating a wrapper as specified above requires that the wrapper not be a menu.) It's definitely something that's worth looking at, in my opinion, although it's hardly critical unless you happen to be on one of the GNOME usability teams.

asa, love the blog, love mofo, love ff, but don't you think comments like "the Gnome and Fedora camps could both take a lesson from Firefox" from within the mozilla camp comes off sounding like you're tooting your own horn. i dunno, it made me chuckle, cause i think you previously invoked firefox when talking about simplifications to opera's interface. i can imagine a post of yours in future where you critique your car's dashboard in terms of how firefox-like or -unlike it is. that would be hilarious!

I need to upgrade my old box's ram to get Fedora on it, but in my school there was a (highly unknown about) RedHat computer. I'm 99% sure it was RedHat 6, and it too has a _ton_ of games. I usually (when school was in session; my last final was last Friday) would go in during homeroom and play. In going through the install process of Fedora 3 (that failed to to ram, because the memcheck app is stupid and said I had enough ram, but I got an error saying I didn't) I saw alot of game choices. [em]I[/em] think the games are cool for students, like me, who are just trying it out and messing around.

Justin, yes, I am tooting our horn here. We did a reasonably good job of making our menus work better for a lot of people. Other applications trying to break into the mainstream and appeal to Regular People would do well to follow our example.

- A

libstdc++.so.5 is available in compat-libstdc++-33 package.

And install kernel-devel package so you don't need to grab kernel sources for programs that want to compile against kernel.

I'm amazed FF is distributed with dynamic linking to libstdc++.so.5. I was convinced the c++ libs were staticly included because it just too hard to get the right version on most systems.

About the fact FF is called "Web Browser" ... (grin) Aren't they just applying your trademark policy ? Don't you remember the policy says you can't call it FF if you recompile it ? Shall I add you to the list of people who strongly dislike this policy ?

jmdesp, no, that has nothing to do with the trademark policy. It's still called Firefox once you start it. It's still branded as Firefox. We work closely with the person who makes the actual build. This is just a silly decision that should be reversed.

- A

Mandriva too don't ship libstdc++.so.5 in thier latest distro,
so it's not just Fedora's "infinite wisdom."

Firefox is the only app that this has caused me "problems" for.

Would suggest for FF 1.1 that this is compiled staticly.

Regarding being called just "web browser", that's definite Gnome policy (though possibly not Red Hat policy, which may by the cause of the inconsistency you pointed out). Gnome's reasoning is that Regular People (as you call them) might be confused by app names such as 'Firefox' and 'The Gimp', but will understand their generic names. I saw Michael Meeks give a talk promoting this as a feature of Gnome last year.

However he did admit that does run into problems after I pointed out I've got a 'Sound & Video' menu featuring both "Audio Player" and "Music Player"; when I'm wanting to load 'XMMS' (cos I know 'XMMS', and actually it isn't so interchangable with 'Rhythm Box' that I can use either without noticing), which should I choose?

I can see what they're aiming for -- making the Gnome desktop less scary for Real People -- but I think it's rather undermining their case for using their software: it's encouraging users to think of their software as being equivalent to other people's (you want a web browser, here's one -- any web browser will do) rather than promoting it as being better (this is the _Firefox_ web browser -- remember that name for later so you can request it elsewhere).

I'm also not sure that even their basic premise is sound: many Real People are familiar with "Firefox"; of those that aren't, many of them just think of 'IE' as "the internet" -- after only ever experiencing the net through 'IE' they don't know where the boundaries are, or what a web browser is -- so the generic term "Web Browser" wouldn't necessarily help them.

Smylers

I don't know about FC4 as I haven't installed it yet, but at least in FC3, the web browser icon on the toolbar is simply a shortcut to htmlview. Htmlview is nothing but a stub for launching the user's browser of choice (configurable in the preferences menu). So the icon is correct in simply pointing to "Web Browser" until htmlview tells it which browser to launch.

Since you brought up the topic of icons, are there any plans for new firefox icons in version 1.1?

To put it nicely, the default firefox icons for linux look like crap. There are pixelization issues all around the edges and it is in serious need of some transparency. The icon is already in PNG format... why not make use of PNG's features and use some alpha transparency?

Before you guys starting cracking down on trademark restrictions, I used to be able to find some much better looking version on the web, but they've all gone away.

See this WONTFIX'ed bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258931

This was a nice post. And as Asa is kicking the linux camps leg, it's time to politely kick a bit back..

* As CFlakes mentions the FF icon on Linux looks crap.
* The Thunderbird icon also looks crap, and I have the same feeling as Asa that whenever TB is updated to a new version I expect it to be fixed, but no.. (Actually TB is worse, the envelope icon looks so crap in the taskbar with a big black area instead of smooth borders.)
* Neither Firefox nor Thunderbird are as stable on Linux as on Windows. This might definitely be an issue with extensions and/or plugins, but it still bothers me as a daily Linux user. (Linux at work, WinXP at home.)

I've been downloading FC4 for the past few days at a blazingly fast 4KB/s over Bittorrent. Looks like my ISP believes media hype more than facts and decided to cripple one of the major distribution methods of OSS. Bah.
Oh well, it might come in useful one day.

That icon issue above: I've got an SVG Fx icon buried in one of my /usr/share/icons subfolders. Works fine in GNOME/KDE. I'll admit the default PNG-8 one _is_ ugly though.

>preferences v system settings
Come on, I thought this one was obvious - the dialogs under preferences are user-specific (themes, window-handling, keyboard shortcuts, sessions etc) and those under system settings are system-wide (mostly hardware and security), thus requiring root. This may seem redundant on your single-user system, but in other contexts, in sensible to make a division.

>default menu, games etc
I'm not sure how fc4 but if it's like fc3 you definately want to replace the custom menu bar with the 'main menu' (icon = red-hat).

You prob have Firefox and Thunderbird has your default web and mail clients (orig icons refer direct to default clients - hence web browser not firefox), but if you have still have Evolution installed, you really should check out the Evolution calendar. Nothing that special over Outlook, but then check out the way it smoothly integrates into the expanded GNOME time/date panel... Now that, I call neat.

Steven Garrity (Mozilla design) on the GNOME/evolution calendar (inc. screenshot)
http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/july/simpledesktop

>panel layout
I found my best panel layout was to have menu, icons, systray all at 32px top, with huge 64 pixel two row window bar at bottom (with desktop switcher, kill and show desktop buttons)

preferences vs system settings:
As many other people have written, this is about user specific preferences versus system settings requiring root access....

firefox vs Web browser:
That is simple and good. Newcomers don't know what a program called firefox, nautilus, eog etc. does, so they are having problems finding the things they need. Gnome solution (which I like very much) is to name menu items after what the program is namely "Web browser", Musix player etc.

Games:
Main menu is categorized (opisite of window's product centered approach). There is games shipped as part of gnome, so of course they are places in a games category. What did you really want ? A category with "Rarely used stuff?" or "Not the primary applications" ? and then under there a Games,Internet etc ??

No thanx!, old redhat tried that and it sucked. Besides Mozilla Thunderbird would end up down there, since Evolution many times are the primary mail app.;-)

You are must really be looking hard to find something *grin*

enough ranting please. now go back and fix firefox :-), espcially the crowded Tools menu ;-)

True, Firefox 1.0 on Linux was tbh apalling. Pages not rendering until fully loaded, that made it as painfully slow as IE on Windows. Personally, I'm not pleased with how Mozilla have ditched their original loyal Linux userbase to target IE/win users instead. Sure they thought "the blue is the internet" but now they just think "the red fox is the internet". They've learnt nothing...

on menus - i don't understand why accessories and games come first then graphics and internet... i think firefox should come first... alphabetical order!

"infinite wisdom"
Don't get me started on the infinite wisdom of the Mozilla team. "Let's disable every feature that isn't in IE so they can't tell them apart". Even find as you type. This is kind of Fresh Madness.

Cathy, you man, don't be such a troll, you should be pleased like us more mature Linux users that another Mozilla developer is trying out our OS. So what to his criticisms? They're all skin-deep, Asa's still got layers more of the Linux nut to crack... Hope you enjoy it, and encourage everyone on Mozilla to give more attention to Linux again!

>menu gripes
My analogy is laughing at an IE user for getting confused by tabs, when they're clearly much simpler and easier. Remember, in Linux, there is nearly always a very good reason for something, and if you're lucky, you should never find out (I disabled the -verbose alias for rm in bash, to make things easier... until I accidently deleted the contents of home).

I really hope you just didn't notice the dialogs asking you for root password, and you aren't logged in as root...

Enjoy Fedora. It's good.

Matt, I've been using Linux for about 6 years now.

I hope with every passing year that it will become easier for people to use and while in some ways it has, there are still glaring problems.

I don't doubt that someone thinks there are good reasons for some of the horrible UI. I do doubt that Linux can continue to gain mainstream acceptance until those issues are revisited and the assumptions behind the current solutions are changed or the solutions themselves are changed.

- A