An anonymous reader writes "The developer of the KDE System Settings application has launched a formal complaint against GNOME for renaming 'Control Center' to 'System Settings' in GNOME 3.0. This developer is demanding that GNOME immediately change the name of their control panel area. Developers on both sides are now discussing this act."

halfaperson writes "In an interview with LinuxFr.org, Lennart Poettering speaks freely about his creations, PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd among other things. Naturally, what has stirred up most of the discussions online is Lennart's opinions on BSD. Following the recent proposal to make Gnome a Linux-exclusive desktop, Lennart explains that he thinks BSD support is holding back a lot of Free Software development. He says this while also taking a stab at Debian kFreeBSD: 'Debian kFreeBSD is a toy OS, people really shouldn't misunderstand that.'"

jfruhlinger writes "Anyone in tech has heard from grousing old-timers who believe the GUI was the beginning of the end of civilization and that EMacs keyboard shortcuts are all the interface anyone should need. But can someone use a modern consumer OS without laying hands on a mouse? Kevin Purdy gave it a week-long try."

dkd903 writes "KDE 4.7 is almost here and brings along with it a number of features and performance improvements such as a better Dolphin with a faster file search, ability of KWin to run on Mobile devices, Grub2 integration in KDM and offline search support in the KDE virtual globe, Marble." Here's KDE's own announcement of the release candidate; the final release is planned for July 27. Reader jrepin quotes the KDE announcement: "With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases."

ErichTheRed writes "This Computerworld piece actually got me thinking — it basically says that there are few good 'starter languages' to get students interested in programming. I remember hacking away at BASIC incessantly when I was a kid, and it taught me a lot about logic and computers in general. Has the level of abstraction in computer systems reached a point where beginners can't just code something quick without a huge amount of back-story? I find this to be the case now; scripting languages are good, but limited in what you can do... and GUI creation requires students to be familiar with a lot of concepts (event handling, etc.) that aren't intuitive for beginners. What would you show a beginner first — JavaScript? Python? How do you get the instant gratification we oldies got when sitting down in front of the early-80s home computers?"

An anonymous reader links to an exhaustive look at the latest Ubuntu, running at Tom's Hardware. "The new Unity interface is broken down into its individual elements and explained ad nauseam. Overall the article is objectively balanced, the author does a good job of pointing out specific design flaws and shortcomings instead of complaining about how Unity doesn't work for him specifically. The walkthrough of the uTouch gesture language is exciting (wish I had multi-touch), though a full listing of keyboard and mouse shortcuts come in handy, too. Towards the end of the article there are benchmarks between Lucid, Natty with Unity, and Natty with the Classic interface. The performance of the Unity interface isn't bad at all, but that kernel power issue does rear its ugly head."

StormDriver writes "GUI has been with us for years and it went a long, long way since the early days. There were some fairly interesting developments along the way, so we took the time to line them up for you."

kai_hiwatari writes "Mozilla Labs has introduced its concept of a desktop replacement called Webian Shell. The Webian Shell basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and web applications are given more importance than the native applications. Right now, the prototype of the Webian Shell is nothing more than a full screen browser with a dock which holds the tabs and the clock." The project's blog offers more about the ideas and underpinnings; there's even more on the home page of developer Ben Francis.

An anonymous reader writes "According to recent benchmarks by Phoronix, using the GNOME Shell will cause a large performance hit when running OpenGL games on Linux. Using Unity and GNOME Shell are also hitting various bugs in the open-source drivers."

A few days ago, the KDE project shipped the first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release. Reader dmbkiwi submits a link to a rundown of what 4.7 looks like, snipping from which: "Previously it was Gnome that was the steady plodder making minor incremental changes through the 2.x series, building stability and only adding minor features. However, with the recent releases of both Gnome Shell and the Unity desktop on Ubuntu, the Gnome/Ubuntu side of the desktop linux equation has made radical and controversial steps away from the well loved Gnome 2.x series, leaving KDE 4.x as the 'steady as she goes' option."

An anonymous reader writes with an editorial from ConceivableTech "Since Google's move to enable users to hide the URL bar, we have seen what could be the beginning of the end of one of the key features of the web browser. Mozilla has its own thoughts, but there is little doubt that Mozilla is reconsidering the purpose of the URL bar in future versions of its browsers. In a Mozilla Labs post today, David Regev suggests that the location bar should be replaced with a tool to support more than just one command."

jrepin writes with this excerpt from an announcement by KDE: "The Desktop Summit is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities, the two dominant forces behind modern graphical software on free platforms. Over a thousand international participants are expected to attend. The main conference takes place from 6-8 August. The annual membership meetings of GNOME and KDE are scheduled for 9 August, followed by workshops and coding sessions on 10-12 August."

fatalGlory writes "Despite some initial reservations about Gnome-shell, it appears to be coming out very nicely. In some preliminary benchmarking tests I've been conducting, Ubuntu's Unity desktop on 11.04 Natty uses roughly double the memory that Gnome-shell uses."

scc writes "TermKit is a re-think of the storied Unix terminal, where human views, input and data pipes are separated. Output viewers render any kind of data usefully. It may not be a new idea, but it's certainly a new take on it." I know you are quite comfortable in your shell of old, but this sort of thing sure gets my juices going. The best of both worlds.

Moderator writes "Could Gnome drop support for non-Linux operating systems? That was a recent proposal on the Gnome mailing list, although there were significant objections in response. Quoting: 'It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels...the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.'"

dkd903 writes "Earlier, during the Natty development cycle we reported that LightDM is being considered as a replacement for GDM. That did not happen for Ubuntu 11.04, but today it has been confirmed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest that LightDM is finally replacing GDM in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric."

MassDosage writes "Apache JMeter written by Emily H. Halili is very much an introductory guide to using Apache's open source JMeter testing tool. Unfortunately a book that should have been good fodder to whet the appetites of testers is spoiled by shoddy editing, poor writing and very little content that isn't already included in JMeter's own user manual." Read below for the rest of MassDosage's review.

Barence writes "Canonical's decision to impose the new Unity interface on Ubuntu 11.04 users appears to have split the Linux distro's users, according to PC Pro. Features such as a moving Launcher bar and invisible scrollbars have angered many users, with one claiming that 'Ubuntu is doing a great job throwing away years of UI experience.' The rush to meet the six-monthly release schedule also appears to have harmed the release, with many users reporting graphical glitches with the new user interface."

Developer Jon Nordby has posted a video demo of the on-screen keyboard Maliit — intended "to be the input method project for MeeGo and other GNU/Linux-based embedded/mobile platforms" — working on a tablet running Gnome 3 under Fedora. Nordby mentions that Fedora packages are in the works for those who'd like to try it out. The keyboard looks impressively smooth and flexible (including language-specific character sets); I only wish it had the smooth-swiping predictive ability of keyboards like Swype.

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle releases NetBeans IDE 7.0, which introduces language support for development to the proposed Java SE 7 specification with the JDK 7 developer preview. The release also provides enhanced integration with the Oracle WebLogic server, as well as support for Oracle Database and GlassFish 3.1. Additional highlights include Maven 3 and HTML5 editing support; a new GridBagLayout designer for improved Swing GUI development; enhancements to the Java editor, and more."