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| GNOME: 'staring into the abyss' |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-07-27 12:41:52 |
| Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought. |
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| RE[2]: gnome3 and unity. |
| By hhas on 2012-07-27 16:44:27 |
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> A few might even crack open their extremely dusty copies of the Art of Unix Programming One addendum: whatever you do, don't read the 'Application Protocol Metaformats' section in Chapter 5. It is appallingly bad and should be avoided like the plague. (I mention this as a meticulously designed high-level IPC system would form a cornerstone of a highly modular DE, so the absolute last thing it needs is to take that material as its guide. Amongst other atrocities, it talks about using HTTP as a transport layer and praises XML-RPC as being very much in the Unix spirit. Anyone who genuinely understands HTTP and REST concepts - i.e. maybe 1% of those who think they do - will tell you such abuse is the very antithesis of Unix good practice. And anyone who believes otherwise should have all their .ini files turned into binary XML format.) |
 - Score: 3 |
| Yet Another Rant |
| By johntdaly on 2012-07-27 16:56:47 |
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I have a lot of issues with this the blog entry, this article and half the comments posted so far. I don't even know where to start, so in no particular order: 1) Neither OpenOffice/LibreOffice nor Firefox are Gnome apps. I use them on my mac at work and on my Windows notebook at home. I would day the same bout Gimp and Inkscape but I think the blog author and a lot of other users confuse Gnome and Gtk WAY to much. 2) What the fuck is Gnome anyway? It sure as hell isn't DE anymore and while we are at it what is a DE? Right now I like the idea of the desktop shell a la E17 the best. I just want something to brows my system that allows me to start apps and switch between them. This confusion about what the fuck a DE is made my switch form Gnome to XFCE more annoying then it had to be. There is no need that for yet another fucking text editor just because I use Gnome3, Mate, XFCE, LXDE, ROX or name your fork here 5000. I liked gedit, I liked network manager (you can disagree, I'm fine with that). So why do I have to either import half of Gnome in any other DE I might choose to run or refuse to use apps I have grown accustomed to? 3) I love seed, the whole JavaScript is really and I want to use it. The problem is hate your desktop. I like QT too but that alone won't get me to use KDE. Gnome 3, Unity and KDE (since version 1, I've tried them all and didn't like any off them) get under my skin so I CAN'T use them. They just feel wrong. With Gnome 3 and Unity I know why that is, they don't appear to be made for the desktop and that is where I want to use them (I'll give Cinnamon 1.4 a try later this weekend, I've tried 1.2 on OpenSuse and had some minor issues with it). 4) Fuck the average user, you wont get them, you don't have them and it is becoming less and less likely that they will ever use a desktop computer if they haven't used one by now. Right now Gnome doesn't run on tablets and neither does KDE, not really anyway. We don't have tablet hardware where we can just slap a Linux tablet distro onto. That's a big problem in the long run and if you REALY care about it go help the KDE people trying to solve this problem OK? Because I just don't give a rats as about KDE or Gnome 3 or Unity on tablets of for that mater netbooks. I'm a programmer, so are almost all other people I know that use Linux in any way, if they aren't programmers they are system admins (with varying programming experience) or at least power users. That's about all for me. I was a happy Gnome 2 user and now I'm using XFCE looking at Cinnamon and if any of the Linux desktops doesn't suit me I can use my favorite apps (that are all open source and cross platform) an mac or windows. And that is the point, stop confusing the desktops with a collection of apps (we are way passed the scarcity of good open source apps that originated this idea) and just give me a desktop and file manager combination that rocks ON the desktop. I'm not intimidated by config options so don't hide them, just don't force me to set them all either. |
| - Score: 5 |
| Comment by spiderman |
| By spiderman on 2012-07-27 17:00:29 |
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Gnome is built on false premise that users want to focus on their task and let the computer deal with the rest. I think the users actually want to know and control what is going on. Let me try a car analogy. One might think users would prefer automatic gears. Actually most of them are more than capable to select the right gear at the right moment. I believe it's the same with DE. Users want to know what task is running and what file is where. |
| - Score: 6 |
| RE: Works for Unity too |
| By Morgul on 2012-07-27 17:01:11 |
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And don't forget Kubuntu. I've been running it for the last 6 versions, and it keeps getting better and better. (Runs solid and fast on everything from my 90's Powerbook G4 to my 6 core custom desktop) While I know next to nothing about Mint, Ubuntu has such traction currently, I've found I save a significant amount of headache by using a variant. Right now the biggest disclaimer I feel I need to give Kubuntu is that they switched their package management GUI to a new project 2 or 3 versions ago, so it still has the occasional glitch. (I typically just use the apt command line utilities, but then again I'm a reformed Gentoo user...) |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Works for Unity too |
| By Kivada on 2012-07-27 17:03:09 |
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There is no reason to go obscure as Gnome 2 isn't dead, it's just been renamed Mate MDM http://mate-desktop.org/ Linux Mint packages it with both their Ubuntu and Debian variants. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3 |
| By Stephen! on 2012-07-27 17:18:14 |
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> KDE has also some serious issues being wanna be windows desktop environment. Is it though? It's been said that some of Microsoft's patents even list KDE as prior art. http://derstandard.at/1313025130... |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE: Android ? |
| By pgeorgi on 2012-07-27 17:25:37 |
| And if you put a traditional desktop on the second virtual terminal (or another Desktop, so the animations can do their magic), you get an approximation of Windows 8: Big Button UI with fallback for legacy apps! |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by UZ64 |
| By UltraZelda64 on 2012-07-27 17:29:53 |
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"GNOME 3 has always been a controversial product. GNOME 2.x was refined for years to a very usable and nice desktop environment - I loved it - and you'd think that with a base as good as this, GNOME 3 would build upon it. Instead, and the GNOME team should be commended for this, they decided to more or less start from scratch (UI-wise) and try and come up with something new and fresh." They'll get no praise from me. It's kind of sad that the project seems to be so fucked right now, but they dug their own grave. Now either they'll be able to somehow weasel their way out of it, or they'll perish. If they didn't release such a crap environment as the "successor" to a well respected one, this wouldn't have happened... and it's some moron at GNOME that decided to do it, so once again, it's all on them. I thought KDE4 was bad; no, it was just highly buggy and incomplete, and it's now running circles around its older 4.x versions, but I'm seeing no sign of GNOME making something good out of GNOME 3. Of course, that would involve turning the whole damn thing around, but I doubt that anyone at GNOME would want to suffer such a blow to their ego. |
| - Score: 7 |
| Gnome |
| By SonicMetalMan on 2012-07-27 17:30:53 |
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Whoever coined the old saying that it is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission didn't intend it to work for software development. Ramming new concepts down the throats of users without clear goals and meaningful milestones is asking for alienation. Gnome 3 missed the mark, KDE has been horrid for many years, so now I use Xubuntu with XFCE. Enough said. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Web apps |
| By vivainio on 2012-07-27 18:26:06 |
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There was a similar public setback for KDE recently: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php... (Dolphin developer quits). I believe these developers are losing interest because the OS is becoming more ephemeral - it doesn't matter much what OS you use, you get a similar experience (that is, the web). The way forward will likely be a shift towards improving the web application experience; Ubuntu already took steps towards this. |
| - Score: 2 |
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