ACK!!'s Journal: What I want in Gnome

I hope to see gnome get some of the below niggling issues out of the way before a ton of huge paragigm shifting changes come down the pike in Gnome 3.0.

1. A menu editor (I know coming gnome 2.12)

2. Better network browsing (also gnome 2.12) -- But will I be prompted for my username and pass when I browse into a host? Will browsing a windows network really work? Time will tell and I really hope because sometimes I don't know the share name is I need.

3. Easy audio CD burning -- Yes I am using it now with Rhythmbox .9 arch main branch. It rocks and so does tag editing and this is needed.

4. Launch feedback for desktop objects (Folders and such on the desktop)

5. Disable doubleclick on panel applets.

6. Improved user level System Tools (coming in gnome 2.12 as a goal) -- we cannot leave it to the distros now can we.

7. Beagle or Storage inclusion -- prefer Storage as a more flexible solution personally.

8. Replacement of esd as a sound daemon -- (gnome 2.12 unassigned goal)

9. Browsing into an archive -- (gnome 2.12 possible uri-chaining)

10. Skippy, expocity or some other form of expose style functionality in gnome.

Here comes the big one. The one I would trade all of the above advancements for. Let me preface this. The next goal should be the biggest and most important goal of the project imho, period. Gnome has a slick, sleek and minimal appearance. This has one unfortunate side-effect for the end user. It looks fast. Users expect it to be fast but gnome is NOT fast without a ton of RAM.

Why do I focus on RAM. My laptop with 128MB is sooo slow I use XFCE now on it. On the other hand, my blastwave package loaded ancient Sun Ultra5 with 256MB is faster, more responsive and livable with gnome. With 512MB on a (I admit it) faster laptop guess what? Gnome is as fast as XP on the same box.

Speed and memory footprint reduction -- Gnome needs to place speed optimization and memory reduction once again imho as a major goal and I am very excited to see that memory reduction appearing as a a goal with even some bounties placed on it.

I really do hope that the gnome team can resolve all of these issues and I find myself also in higher spirits seeing a number of gnome developers wishing for a return and a new birth of a proper focus on a gnome office as oppossed to relying on the good will of the OpenOffice group. Maybe someone will become motivated to start working crawiaps or another project.

However, I seriously doubt that every issue I mentioned above can all be completely resolved in one release.