As much a I prefer Gnome's usability over any other Unix DE, at the same time I despise GTK+ and its (non-existent) dev tools. Glade is junk, end of story. You go nowhere with such an amateur app. It is as inconsistent and feels like "the Blender" of its kind. Anjuta is the only Gnome IDE but is not even stable in its 2.x branch yet. Gnome lacks a full solution similar to the power of Qt Designer, KDevelop and the kind of integration these have achieved over the years.
Eclipse might be an interesting addition here for Gnome development but it still lacks a GTK+ RAD tool. All these companies backing up Gnome, from Red Hat to Sun and even Novell, they should think more about the dev tools they currently offer, because they are very important for the decision making of new developers migrating from Windows to Linux. If they can't create one, 'frobnicate' Qt Designer to fully support GTK+ code generation.
GTK+
Moreover, I need a faster GTK+ and an easier to use API. GTK+ 1.x was "ok fast" for its time but GTK+ 2.x gives that "slow feeling" even on very fast machines. I can see the window border draw and then I immediately see the content getting drawn etc. Arguably GTK+ 2.x is pretty fast under the hood, but on displaying stuff on screen in a way that feels good and responsive, it does a terrible job. And impressions do matter, even if these are just "impressions".
Mono & GTK#, gtkmm, pyGtk, gtk-Perl, Ruby-gtk, wxGTK
This wish is on its way to being granted. Murray Cumming is pushing on a "Gnome bindings" release that will allow people to easily use GTK+ bindings and utilize a plethora of Gnome applications that depend on these bindings. This has being a problem so far for many users as installing some of these bindings were not always trivial.
KDE, freedesktop.org, HIG, themes
While this is more an in-progress wish, I will still mention it: it would be great if Gnome had better integration with KDE on 2.8 or 3.0 (and the other way around of course). This would include not only menu integration, but also an *updated* shared HIG (very important, as I get so confused with "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons being reversed on apps) and also themes! I want 2-4 themes to be "shared" and included on the default installations of KDE and Gnome. For example, take Plastic and Keramik from KDE and the "Default" and the "Freecurve" from Gnome and make sure there are versions for both GTK+ and Qt. Each time I am on KDE and I use Plastik, make it so all my Gnome apps loaded under KDE also use the GTK+ version of Plastik. Or when I am on Gnome and I use the "Simple/Default" theme, make it so that all KDE apps now use the equivalent Qt theme, no matter what Qt-config is configured to use originally. I need consistency even if it only extends (for now) to just a few number of themes. KDE does a similar trick via its .gtkrc-kde file, but this is far from an elegant solution, as many times it displays dark selection colors on black text that makes GTK apps unreadable under KDE (depending on the theme).
Nautilus Authentication
Many times I need a way to copy or move a file away from somewhere other than my home directory using Nautilus and instead of telling me that I don't have the permissions to do that, I want an authentication alert window (a la OS X Finder) to let me enter the root password and do the job. Possibly difficult to implement as it might be a security risk if not done right, but then again, for a desktop setup it is absolutely needed.
Copy/Paste still misbehaves after all these years
Copy/paste still just doesn't work properly. I cut or copy files off my desktop and try to paste them on another Nautilus window and that would only work half the time. The behavior is random but reproducible on any distro I have tried lately. Quite possibly this is not a Nautilus bug but maybe a more deep one, but the point of the matter is that this inconsistent behavior on many Gnome and KDE apps (not just Nautilus) is just bad. And drag-n-drop should also become better too. Most of the apps don't support it at all.
Accessibility
While I don't personally need any accessibility features I recognize that there are others who do. Web Browsers and Email Clients are the apps that most "normal" users use most of the time. Support for blind people should be there, even if the Mozilla toolkit doesn't support ATK's accessibility features. Someone should do the engineering for this because Gnome takes pride over its accessibility features and a web browser is maybe the No1 app that also needs it. And Epiphany doesn't, as far as I know.
GConf Editor
More and more apps are using GConf these days. That's good. The bad news is that it has become impossible to find stuff in it now that it's so overpopulated. I need a "search" function there!
Printing, Scanning, Faxing
Ximian has done some good work on the printing UI and the networking connectivity UI and also XSane is pretty useful too. How about some integration to Gnome of all this code and some clean up too for more HIG compliance (especially in the case of XSane)?
Storage
A few months ago we were stunned by the innovation Storage would bring to us, but we haven't had any news on its development since then. I hope that users will have something solid to play with next year.
Preference Panels, System Integration
The current preference scheme is problematic and the Gnome maintainers don't want to add more pref panels because they are too many of them. This is primarily a problem of layout and how these are served to the user more than anything else (being a "menu" doesn't scale). The way Ximian and Apple serve the preference panels to the users should be adopted (or something similar). Instead of throwing in a menu all these little apps, logically place them on a pref window with categories and modularize them. Also, merge keyboard and mouse, merge the UI applets (e.g. theme, gtk prefs, metacity) etc and suddenly you have a clean pref launch window.
Moreover, I would like to see system utilities in that new pref panel order (let distros write their own modules for that new system). Doing a spec of a sort, or via LSB and with agreement with the BSD people and others, provide system panels to modify services, Apache, Samba, users, modules and drivers, hardware configuration etc. etc. I am not suggesting a complete mess like KDE's KCenter. Keep simplicity and "less is more" in mind always. Integration with the underlying system is what can make a difference today on the Unix DEs.
MIME fixes
The MIME dialogs are currently terrible and difficult to use if the user is not experienced. BeOS had a very-easy-to-understand panel, but thankfully work has started on this department too on Gnome.
Samba on Nautilus
It is broken. It has more problems than it has support for. It really requires a good clean up and proper testing.
- "Gnome in general"
- "Gnome and System Integration"
- "What is a DE without applications?"
