Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 28th Nov 2012 16:32 UTC
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Member since:
2009-06-30
The problem is, we can't. Gnome 2 was the face of Linux. It wasn't perfect (I preferred Xfce even then) but it was familiar to newcomers and sufficiently unobtrusive for experienced users.
Now, new users are presented with either unfamiliar Unity, KDE which is an island of its own, or a whole slew of more or less niche desktops: Mate, Xfce, Gnome 3, Cinnamon etc. This is now how you gain mind and market share, and without it we will all soon be like ham radio enthusiasts.
The biggest mistake was to allow Gnome guys to destroy Gnome 2. They wanted to play with something new? Fine, but the rest of us should not distribute it until they have resolved naming conflicts with Gnome 2. Pushing this task to Mate developers was simply wrong. Not only they wasted a year of work but also we've all lost a popular brand.
Another solution to naming conflicts would be to change the directory structure and install each group of packages in its own --prefix. This is what every single UNIX workstation is using for managing third-party applications.
Talking about workstations, I'm also interested in what we'll get after RHEL6. I can't really see Gnome Shell in this role. Not that I have to worry about it - it wouldn't be qualified by our software vendors anyway. And since an OS is either qualified in its default configuration or not at all, it raises an interesting question about the future of RHEL.