Submitted by As most of you will know, the GNOME team is hard at work on GNOME 3.0, the first major overhaul of the platform since 2002. The release of GNOME 3.0 was originally planned for March 2010, but it has now been pushed back for six months to September 2010.
The reason is rather clear: the GNOME team wants to ensure the quality of the release is up to snuff. To make sure that it is, the release date for GNOME 3.0 has been pushed back until September 2010, while the March 2010 release will be GNOME 2.30 (in other words, 2.32 will be 3.0). The March 2010 date was clearly preliminary, so a delay is nothing surprising.
“The release date for 3.0 was not set in stone: while we’re using a strict schedule that allows us to release GNOME every six months, GNOME is above all using quality-based release engineering,” Vincent Untz writes, “That’s why our community wants GNOME 3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more appropriate.”
GNOME 3.0 will be used as an “excuse” to cut out a lot of the cruft that has accumulated within the platform over the years, but at the same time, the interface is being redone from the ground-up. The interface is built around the new Clutter-based GNOME Shell and Zeitgeist.
GNOME 2.30 will not be a lost upgrade, though. “Compared to GNOME 3.0, GNOME 2.30 will see the iterative improvements and bug fixes that people have now come to expect from our 2.x branch, in addition to some preliminary work needed for GNOME 3.0,” Utz writes.
It should be 2010 not 2009.
Now it says it was originally planned for March 20010
In the grim darkness of the future there is only Gnome 3.0!
Bwuh sorry guys, I’m not feeling well. Doing the best I can:).
Awww, *group hug!*
GNOME 3.0 was never officially announced for spring 2010. The plan has always been to make 2.30 the 3.0 release if it fits and wait for 2.32 otherwise. So, nothing was “pushed back” here…
Why don’t we just release 3.0.0 now? It doesn’t matter if it’s incomplete, buggy, and unfinished at this stage of development, because we can just say that 3.0.0 is not Gnome 3. The distros will hold it back until it’s really ready. But it will give them a chance to start getting it integrated. And within a year and a half to two years, I’m sure everything will be just fine.
Edited 2009-11-11 14:19 UTC
Yes, good idea. It worked so well for KDE4…
😛
Javier
Believe or not, this strategy worked quite well! (for KDE at least)
The rushed release of KDE4.0 attracted quite a number of developers to it by providing a clear look of their new development path, and avoided it to become a vaporware after numerous delays, refreshing the interest on it.
Opensource development is all about momentum, if it looses, the development stops and the software never gets released due the lack of stimulus. KDE4.0 provided a base development environment for the developers outside the core of KDE project to port and test their applications, and provided them with something new, albeit bugged, to play.
Edited 2009-11-11 14:54 UTC
Maybe from the developer point of view it was a success. But for the point of view of a humble user, it was a complete disaster.
In my case, I’ve been using KDE since KDE 2. I stoped using KDE six months ago when I started to work with KDE4. Suddenly Xfce or even Gnome were a better choice for me. I don’t think that I’ll be a KDE user again in the next years.
Anyway I wish that the Gnome 3 release is a huge success.
Javier
Stop writing such bullsh*t. The only distro which went for KDE 4.0 exclusively was Fedora. All other distros either stayed with KDE 3.5 (eg. Debian and PCLinuxOS) or made a KDE 4 version optionally available (eg. Kubuntu, openSUSE).
Don’t pretend as users were not warned of KDE 4.0’s immaturity: http://en.opensuse.org/Image:OS11.0-inst-6.jpg
I waited until KDE 4.1 was released before start using KDE 4. According to the press release (http://kde.org/announcements/4.1/):
“July 29, 2008. The KDE Community today released KDE 4.1.0. This release is the second feature release of the KDE 4 series, sporting new applications and newly developed features on top of the Pillars of KDE4. KDE 4.1 is the first KDE4 release to contain the Personal Information Management suite KDE-PIM with its E-Mail client KMail, the planner KOrganizer, Akregator, the RSS feed reader, KNode, the newsgroup reader and many more components integrated into the Kontact shell. Furthermore, the new desktop shell Plasma, introduced in KDE 4.0, has matured to the point where it can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users.”
But it wasn’t ready for users like me. And I’m a regular user, nothing extraordinary. I don’t see the need to exaggerate in a Free software press release.
I just hope that the Gnome developer team has learnt one lesson or two and they don’t commit the same mistakes.
Edited 2009-11-11 16:09 UTC
Strage, how you missed the little word “most”.
Strange, how hardcore KDE fans keep trying to rewrite the disastrous release history of KDE4. KDE 4.0 to 4.2 was frought with end-user problems. KDE4.3 was where things started to gel.
The problem has never been the technology of KDE4. It has been the PR management. It was handled poorly. No problem, people make mistakes. What is a problem though is the occasional “It never happened” attitude from some KDE4 fans.
We were all there when it happened, remember?
Strange how even after two years, hardcore GNOME fans keep trolling about KDE 4.0.
Even stranger: They keep mentioning how Linus hated 4.0 — Linus, the guy who keeps adding experimental features (ext4, btrfs,…) to release kernels, citing FOSS’ “release early, release often” mantra.
KDE 4.2 was a great release. It was praised by reviewers across the board.
4.1 wasn’t the most awesome release in the history, but it was OK. Plasma still had some missing features, but Plasma is only a small part of KDE. The biggest part of KDE are its apps.
Novell certainly though that KDE 4.1 was good enough for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (thus Novell needs to commit to KDE 4.1 for 7 years).
KDE 4.0 happened. GNOME 2.0 happened. Linux 2.0.0 happened. Linux 2.2.0 happened. Pulse Audio happened.
Etc. pp.
They will commit an even more horrendous mistake: gnome shell and further integration of monkey-mono shit into gnome 3.0. Good luck with that!
What’s Mono got to do with anything? Nobody is talking about integrating Mono into Gnome, except maybe the Mon-haters like yourself. Sure, there are some people writing Gnome apps with it, but the core Gnome people aren’t even talking about it.
After I started to use Gnome Shell I don’t think I will be able to work again with “Old Gnome”. New look is just more useful.
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_ROYCjxde4tQ/Svsf2PCGy0I/AAAAAAAAA1M/QauqySPdj…
Edited 2009-11-11 21:04 UTC
Ha, now I see why it’s using clutter: it’s too cluttered.
It’s only a screen shoot of virtual desktop chooser/menu system.
And it’s not even final version of it.
Desktop view:
http://lh3.ggpht.com/_ROYCjxde4tQ/SvtBI8RE-xI/AAAAAAAAA1c/KSr4n-hXz…
Even more screen shoots:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Screenshots
Now that’s better, or saner, at least for my taste
Why not? Gnome has tended to do it for years. Whatever did happen to 10×10 I wonder? Where is the code for that?
So you decided to ditch what worked for you in the name of a press release, jumped into bed with a distribution that doesn’t test its releases other than to do some vague version bumping (which is all of them) and you’re bitching to the high heavens about it?
Were you not around for Gnome 2.0’s launch?
The problem is if they don’t learn from KDE and have the courage to make the jump at some point as they did, and actually come up with a GTK 3 that would make Gnome 3 actually worth something, then Gnome 3 will merely be an inadequate version bump to try and give the impression that they’re not seriously falling behind.
Don’t pretend that “warning” did a damn thing to deflect the negativity of end users, especially with development on the KDE3 branch effectively dead as soon as 4.0 hit. 4.x is just now starting to hit the level of maturity that should’ve been delivered in 4.1 and we’re still missing major features.
Next time, try harder to come up with a convincing lie. KDE 3.5.10 was released one month after KDE 4.1.0: http://kde.org/announcements/announce-3.5.10.php
KDE 3.5 still receives bugfixes. The last one is just eight days old: http://websvn.kde.org/branches/KDE/3.5/
The KDE 3.5-based “Enterprise” branch of KMail and the other PIM apps is still in very active development with the last bugfix less than one day old: http://websvn.kde.org/branches/kdepim/enterprise/
Maintenance mode life support hardly constitutes active development. It may be less buggy, but it’s still stuck in 2007
The only aspect bad about early KDE 4 releases was Plasma. All the apps have always been better than the KDE 3 counterparts.
I’ve used the KDE 3 Workspace with KDE 4 apps for quite some time.
He never even mentioned distributions and he didn’t pretend users were not warned of KDE 4.0’s immaturity, so don’t attack somebody (e.g. “stop writing such bullsh*t”) when you haven’t properly read his posting.
So “humble users” compile KDE from source instead of acquiring it from a distributor?
He wrote that for “humble users” KDE 4.0 was a “disaster”, even though most normal users did never even see KDE 4.0, because except Fedora (and in that case only the KDE spin) no distro adopted KDE 4.0 as its default desktop.
I thought Mandriva adopted it. These releases come out and say there normal but they’re RC or chock full of Beta software.
It wasnt there for a humble user. Everyone warned several times: you just didnt listen and now you are bitching about it.
There was only a warning if you followed the devs mailing lists. Where were the warnings in the official press release?
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/
If you read the release it sounds like it is completely ready for all users. KDE 4.0 should have been released as KDE 4 DR1 (Developer Release 1). If KDE 4.0 was intended to only be a developer and advanced user release then why did they release beta-quality software with a stable-quality moniker? Why not just adopt a moniker that properly communicates the intended audience in the name?
Why were further efforts not made to run KDE 4 alongside KDE 3 during the development process? It seems to me that KDE has alienated at least part of their user base due to the way (or the perception that) they tried to force users to upgrade to KDE 4. Is there some technical reason a KDE 3.6 release could not have been made that was designed to run KDE 4 applications and allow both versions to co-exist on the same machine with no conflicts, so that users who wanted to run a completely polished KDE could do so until KDE 4 became a superior environment?
GNOME should have used DR monikers until 2.6, IMO. The GNOME community obviously felt that their previous decision to release beta-quality software with a stable-quality moniker was a mistake that they are now attempting to avoid with the GNOME 3.0 process.
Also why does KDE use a different six month release cycle than GNOME, especially in light of the fact that distros are just backporting features thereby making development more difficult for upstream?
Users usually acquire their desktop environment from distributors. It’s the distributor’s responsibility to only ship software that is “ready”.
No matter what the release announcements from KDE.org say: Distributors need to do their own testing. They need to follow mailing lists, They need to follow dot.kde.org.
And even if KDE 4.0 had been marked as beta, what would have been the difference? At least Ubuntu and AFAIK also Fedora shipped a beta release of Firefox 3.0 as default browser.
Pretty much every current mainstream distro ships only the current beta of Thunderbird, instead of the stable 2.0 one.
PulseAudio never really worked well, hence it has a 0.x version number. Still, every distro ships it (openSUSE 11.2 disables PA for KDE, though).
So if you want to bitch against someone, bitch against the distributors who have bad or no quality assurance.
I’m not a big Mozilla fan. But they do, at least, have a better project management track record than KDE. And Fedora will ship anything, as long as it passes the “Oooh! Shiny!” test.
Edited 2009-11-11 18:31 UTC
If that was true, Thunderbird 3.0 would have been released in Summer 2008, along with Firefox 3.0.
The current TB3 betas are nothing but an unstable port of TB2 to the latest Gecko. The only new features are quick account setup and tabs.
No switch to SQLite (still using Mork), no Exchange compatibility, no overhaul of the address book, Lightening pretty much dead as well, etc.
The last TB maintainers were arrogant d*ckheads who never ever listened to users’ requests. Then they left Mozilla, and TB laid dormant, only getting Gecko fixes that were developed for Firefox.
To ensure the Gecko 1.9.x port, TB had to be spun off to a new development organization (Mozilla Messaging).
During the same time, KDE developed a whole new PIM framework (Akonadi), did a major overhaul of KMail’s message view (incl. tabs, btw), completely rewrote the address book (done, to be released with KDE 4.4), rewrote the RSS reader (only slightly missed the feature freeze deadline, so to be released with 4.5), etc.
Better project management than KDE? Yeah, right…
Indeed. And every other distro didn’t force anyone towards KDE 4.0. They either stayed with 3.5 exclusively or offered both. Every sane distro (like openSUSE) made it very clear that 3.5 was more mature at that time.
There were several blog posts about it including http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html
It was both users and distro’s fault and totally expected.
Blog posts like that one were of course aggregated through planet.kde.org, a must-read for every distributor shipping KDE — planet.gnome.org and blog.xfce.org are must reads if a distributor ships GNOME and/or Xfce.
But it was a distro disaster, not a KDE disaster. I mean the message was plain and clear and intended for distribution vendors, not end users (most end users get KDE through a distro vendor).
It was the failure of distributions to apply common sense, starting with the early integration of KDE 4.0 in Kubuntu… Sadly, other distributions followed suit… Oh wait, that’s not even the case… Major vendors offered both a stable KDE 3.5.x and the new KDE 4.x release, with more or less clear descriptions in the release notes about the potential issues with the new release. But quite a few users just couldn’t wait, went ahead (despite warnings from both KDE and their distro vendors), then started to whine about the lack of feature parity with old kde, even though they were warned through multiple channels BEFORE they tried it out…
Something that calling it “KDE 4 Developer Preview: A Clear Look at Our New Development Path” would have done just as well, without being deceptive.
Vaporware? The code was already out there for developers to see, use, and plan for. What they did was to try to trick users and distros into using noxious vapor^W^Walpha code. And that *did* work. Though I would not call it a success. Did I hear someone say that the distros were free to make their own decisions? Well… we saw how that worked out.
Oh, please. FUD much? Was the KDE4 project so close to death that the remaining devs had no choice but to resort to deception in order to resuscitate their withering project?
And a developer preview wouldn’t have given them that? KDE 4.0.0 was intended to trick the community into serving the KDE devs’ needs by unwittingly testing incomplete, alpha quality code when they wouldn’t have had KDE 4.0.0 been labeled honestly.
Edited 2009-11-11 15:15 UTC
Nay, i don’t think that the project managers resorted to deception at all.
KDE has a long history of their “0” releases being rather crappy. Just remember the 3.0 release. The 4.0 project was a huge rewrite, with lots of old things being scrapped, the developers has been clearly overloaded (some people even began to question the usefulness of the new architecture, asking simple to port KDE3 to QT4).
The KDE project ended up with the following rationale: “our current developers cannot extend or test it any further, and people are loosing the interest, we should release”. So it got released on a “as is” basis.
No, most binary distros avoid packing RCs and developers previews. The KDE folks wanted that developers who does not care that much for KDE project to compile it all by himself (or search for alternative repositories), to have a taste of their new architecture. Most distros out there knew that KDE4.0 has not really for end users, so they packed it as optional.
It wasn’t the best move, but at least it was a move that did something for KDE. Take a look at KDE right now, it’s the desktop gnome would like to be. It isn’t perfect, but for the majority of users it works, and it’s being polished constantly.
KDE is NOT stuck in the past like Gnome with the sorrow Gtk 2 toolkit. Still using libegg? Still using Bonobo? Still using CORBA? Still using that Windows registry ripoff called gconf? No native good mail client (come on, that garbage of outlook copy comes no close to KMail unless you only care about Exchange connectivity), best image viewer is mono based? Still relying in compiz for desktop effects? Any good music player that comes close to Amarok?
So KDE didn’t need testing after all? Everybody knows a major point-zero release is a potential source of bugs and new untested stuff. The problem was that distro packagers offered an upgrade to it without reading carefully. And users really wanted to use it even when it was clear it wasn’t complete.
KDE is NOT stuck in the past like Gnome with the sorrow Gtk 2 toolkit. Still using libegg? Still using Bonobo? Still using CORBA? Still using that Windows registry ripoff called gconf? No native good mail client (come on, that garbage of outlook copy comes no close to KMail unless you only care about Exchange connectivity), best image viewer is mono based? Still relying in compiz for desktop effects? Any good music player that comes close to Amarok?
Those are all opinions, not facts. I for example very much like Rhythmbox a whole lot better than Amarok. And Evolution I like a lot more than KMail. Besides, Metacity does nowadays do compositing too.
Stop throwing around your opinions as facts.
GTK2 may not be the most advanced toolkit but what exactly is so off putting about it? It has been improving with every release.
Bonobo is CORBA. All of that crap has been in the process of being phased out for a while now anyway. It would be stupid to just pull the rug out from everything that depends on those things.
What exactly does the registry have in common with gconf other than centralized settings and an editor that resembles regedit to a degree? It certainly doesn’t suffer from any issues that the registry suffers from. If you think the two are even remotely similar other than the two things I mentioned then you have very little experience with one or both of them.
What? Evolution rocks. It used to be a buggy piece of shit but it’s been very stable for at least a few releases now. I’m not sure what KMail could possibly have over Evolution.
Eog is the GNOME image viewer, not F-Spot and it is very good at what it does.
Compiz isn’t a part of GNOME. GNOME 3.0 is going to integrate some level of 3D effects but for those of us who like Compiz there is no harm in replacing Metacity with it so I’m not sure where your complaining comes from.
Personally I find Amarok’s interface a disaster. Banshee does everything I need in a music player and more.
One – if you don’t care if it’s incomplete, buggy, and unfinished, you’re welcome to run the development releases, or out of git/svn.
Two, this isn’t KDE4, a complete rewrite. It’s simply an evolution of the 2 series, which is already perfectly well integrated by distros. All they need is for the upstream Gnome developers to get things feature-complete and stable, then the distros are ready to start pushing betas and release candidates out to would-be users.
Well, if the Gnome groups think it’s better to delay to offer something good, I’m all for it. But it better be good.
Unlike KDE 4.0, boy, that was painful. It was a start but was incomplete and buggy.
Well, KDE 4.0 was also postponed once.
And it was a successful release. It had a goal which was reached.
It’s a good thing banks don’t follow that philosophy or your life savings might be lost, due to their reaching a development goal.
“Well, we released the software. All the accounts show zero balances, but we finished on time.”
Yes, that’s successful.
You can’t messure success only looking at the past. You have to look at the present and account for the future. Isn’t KDE 4 successful already?
So was GNOME 2.0.
Does anyone care what version number they tack on to their next release? The actual release schedule does not change.
It matters, because 3.0 is the point where they’re free to break compatibility where necessary, ditching deprecated code that’s accumulated since the early days of the 2.x series. It’s also likely to be the point where something like Gnome Shell might become the default desktop shell, replacing the current panel.
So the original goal had been that the next 2.30 release would be that big one. It now looks like 2.32 will be the big one, and 2.30 will be just another progressive release like 2.28 was – a few feature changes, and a lot of background work…
Good. Maybe Ubuntu will take a lesson from them.
maybe 10.10 instead of 10.04 will be the next Ubuntu LTS version.
Ubuntu LTS wouldn’t ship GNOME 3.0 anyway.
This “delay” will affect them not at all, since it is not a delay. Spring 2010 or Fall 2010 was always the target release date range. And Spring 2010 always seemed a bit optimistic to me.
And as an admin, I certainly would not *want* to see a major DE change in an LTS release!
1.) KDE 4.0 is two years old. 4.4 is about to be released very soon.
2.) This story is about GNOME, not KDE.
3.) GNOME 3.0 and KDE 4.0 have almost nothing in common. GNOME 3.0 won’t even use a new toolkit. Even GTK 3.0 (likely to be introduced after GNOME 3.0, btw) isn’t really a new generation toolkit. Instead it just deprecates old stuff, hence breaking binary (and source) compatibility and hence needs a new major version number.
Now actually regarding GNOME 3.0:
I find it sad that good technologies like Global Menu have been rejected from inclusion.
Personally I’m not convinced about GNOME-Shell, but I’ll check it out anyway.
I’m also curious about the future relationship between Compiz and GNOME. Despite a big overlap between both user groups, both projects never really worked together. As far as I understand, GNOME-Shell won’t even run without Mutter — the new GNOME window manager.
3.) GNOME 3.0 and KDE 4.0 have almost nothing in common. GNOME 3.0 won’t even use a new toolkit. Even GTK 3.0 (likely to be introduced after GNOME 3.0, btw) isn’t really a new generation toolkit. Instead it just deprecates old stuff, hence breaking binary (and source) compatibility and hence needs a new major version number.
I don’t really like KDE4, but one thing that immediately struck me when I tried it was that it featured lots of animation and they were all _very_ smooth and fluid, compared to GTK+ apps which barely ever have any kind of animation and even then they are jerky and really basic ones.
I am not certain if it’s a limitation of GTK+ itself, but I do suspect it is. Why else would there be so little visible animations in GTK+ apps when QT apps feature such all the time? Anyways, if I am correct then I really wish they’d put more effort into improving GTK+ 3.x and its graphical output capabilities. And make it use Cairo with OpenGL acceleration when available, not software rasterisation >_<
AFAIK it’s a GTK limitation and one that won’t really be resolved. Instead the apps need to be migrated to Clutter (Moblin’s toolkit).
GNOME-Shell is being written with Clutter right from the start, so no migration effort needed here. A few games (which are relative small in comparison) already made the transition or are in the progress of being ported.
Personally, I really don’t understand why the GNOME project wants to maintain two totally separate toolkits (GTK and Clutter) during the 3.x life cycle. Sounds like unnecessary duplicate effort. Moblin shows that being Clutter-only is perfectly possible.
(BTW: Qt gets a new animation framework in 4.6.)
AFAIK it’s a GTK limitation and one that won’t really be resolved. Instead the apps need to be migrated to Clutter (Moblin’s toolkit).
GNOME-Shell is being written with Clutter right from the start, so no migration effort needed here. A few games (which are relative small in comparison) already made the transition or are in the progress of being ported.
Personally, I really don’t understand why the GNOME project wants to maintain two totally separate toolkits (GTK and Clutter) during the 3.x life cycle. Sounds like unnecessary duplicate effort. Moblin shows that being Clutter-only is perfectly possible.
I took a really quick look through the Moblin website and I saw a mentioning that you can use GTK+ widgets with Moblin. Also looking through the website I saw no mention of it providing any widgets of its own. So, I am wondering, is it more like an animation/layout library and you still have to use GTK+ for widgets themselves? If so then it’ll still suffer from the poor performance and software rasterisation of GTK+ widgets themselves.
Sorry if I am asking the wrong person, you just seemed to know more than me anyways.
Most of what I know about Clutter is from its Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutter_%28toolkit%29
According to that one its possible to create Clutter-only GUIs.
1) KDE 4.0 was a major desktop overhaul, causing the desktop itself to become more complex, confusing and buggy. It took 4 feature release cycles to get the whole monster a bit stable, however, up to this day, I still think that the kickoff menu is cluttered with too much logic, drawers and hidden places. Linus abandoned KDE, and the userbase share is decreasing after this KDE community move: one of the stupidiest ones made in open source community.
2) GNOME 2.x while not being the hottest “major” desktop left for us to use, commits a deadly sin, treating every user like a plain silly dumb. I still don’t know why the heck Nautilus is the default file manager on this desktop. I hate Nautilus, I can’t lasso files in list view. I can’t also understand why GNOME redraws are slower than anything I’ve seen. I have to have compiz enabled to be able to not see that. Perhaps GTK? Who cares… it is just the way it is. Although GNOME is OK, it is not the hottest thing on earth.
3) XFCE, if not by this ridiculous name, could be reaching the status of leading desktop. Unfortunately, distros don’t focus polishment on this one in favour of GNOME. I don’t know why the project owner insists with this name, I hope someday he will regret. His desktop could very well be the leading Linux desktop. Oh and tha ridiculous rat should be killed too. 😉
4) What I see right now is that, although we are well served with many options, no options leads to a consensus – no options are the perfect desktop. If you mix their applications, everything gets messy and UI inconsistent.
5) Google Chrome OS is being developed and will be released. If these desktops we know don’t do their homework, I am sure Chrome OS will storm the Linux arena. Take as an example the Chrome browser – it’s definitely a Firefox/Opera killer. And it amazes me that neither Opera or Mozilla community ever thought of the changes Chrome introduced. We were going to be doomed for years, by these mediocre browsers. I do hope Chrome OS will make Ubuntu and Fedora regret for investing so much in GNOME.
It is a mouse.
Who cares about Linus preferred desktop. I don’t think the userbase is decreasing. Take a look at all the available distros. Most of them come with gnome as default. That’s where the gnome users come from (all those Ubuntu kids). There are no realistic metrics to measure desltop adoption. For sure, there are better Qt based apps (and some of them also KDE) that Gtk/Gnome.
For some reason, I always liked Nautilus. That’s why I love Dolphin, except it’s way more powerfull.
Wow, how unfair. You know most things Chrome has are copied from Opera? Google just took what others provided and invented and refined in a “better” browser.
They can’t be compared. I mean, being Chrome a browser, how can it compete with non browser based applications?
Linus usually is right about his decisions. Abandoning KDE was an alive proof that the highest linux entity could not bear the “clever” changes KDE geeks made. And yes, the userbase is decreasing, Kubuntu has been going on a downward spiral, serious enough for them to publish in their homepage that they must do something about it. This is because of KDE4. People are going away from KDE4. No matter what KDE4 fanboys scream out there.
It’s so powerful, I can’t even use it. There are 3 panels, a lot of vertical text, and have you tried copy files from a samba share in Konqui or Dolphin? Files don’t even get fully copied. At least Nautilus does this well. In my honest opinion, KDE4 and their file managers just try to “get close as possible to Windows Vista/7 but not that in your face, to at least say, hey we’re not windows at all”
Someone has invented the ball, right? But the someone later created football (soccer). I don’t care if Opera created tabs – the truth is that this browser never handled 80% of webpages out there, while Firefox did at least 95%. Chrome is a refined idea of what others almost got right, but never quite right.
The ideas can be compared. If Google does the same thing in Chrome OS, as they did with Chrome Browser, I think Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME and KDE are going to lose a lot, and I mean a lot. There will be no room anymore for recovering userbase, after Microsoft Windows finds a real strong balanced open source competitor.
He couldn’t bear the buggy 4.0 in fedora. I’m not surprised, for me 4.2 was the first version fit for daily use (I use Ubuntu). This tells nothing about the long term viability of the kde4 platform.
This is pretty elementary stuff, surely there should be no need to explain this over and over again.
He is in no way a representative of all Linux users.
No. It is only proof that he did’t read the KDE 4.0 release. It is obvious he installed it (as I did) and then regreted for it not being usable enough. Surprise surprise… In the meanwhile, he went to Gnome, the desktop that he had touted as “for idiots”. That says it all.
How interesting… Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the only distros now? There’s a reason for Kubuntu to be a mess: it doesn’t have as much support and as many developers as Ubuntu has. Should it be the other way around and it would certainly shine. Gnome would be nothing without Ubuntu support.
Sure they do. But it’s their fault their distro sucks for being too oriented towards Gnome. You can’t have it all.
No it isn’t. It’s because Ubuntu has all the developers working on Gnome.
And people are going away from Gnome too. The fact is I don’t care as long as KDE developers keep doing an excellent job.
Linus said Gnome is for idiots, so there you have it.
You can have more or less or none if you want.
Where? What’s the problem? Can’t you read more than a line of text?
Yes, never had a problem. Maybe you have to check your distro configuration of samba?
So because you have a problem, then the whole program is doomed?
They are file managers, they existed before Windows in a form or another. How exactly Konqueror or Dolphin have some resemblance to the Windows filemanagers other that they both “manage files”?
Quite interesting. It seems the world wide web is perfect now thanks to google and its browser. Thank god! I’ll see you when the next big browser comes out and you can’t stop difamating the others that preceded it.
But how a web browser is going to provide what real desktop applications provide today with more desktop integration, speed, responsiveness…? I see Chrome OS is an interesting idea that may flourish. But do you really want a web only OS?
Time for a reality check: Most GNOME development is done by Red Hat and Novell.
Canonical has almost no one working on it. For a long time Canonical was merely a freeloader. Luckily after bad press that changed and Canonical started contributing back (AFAIK a GNOME-Do dev is now paid by Canonical, for example).
Even though Canonical now contributes code now, it’s still a relatively minor contributor.
If you have any hard data on that subject, I’m keen to see it. If you don’t: STFU.
Could you like tone it down brother? Either you have a point or you don’t, but constant use of (even oblique) expletives and generally harsh language is entirely unnecessary: unless you are specifically out to demonstrate you have a monopoly in being uncouth, please give it a rest.
Thanks.
With the coming of Zeigheist and Gnome-Shell, it was really looking like trying to go with Gnome 3 by March would be dreaming. The fact that the team agreed to push it back is a smart decision. I’ve tried Gnome-shell and while I can see where they are headed, I’m sure they would like more polish on it and perhaps allow for some of those great panel applets we had before to be a part of it. I’m looking forward to a well thought out and successful release.
Deleted
Edited 2009-11-11 22:29 UTC
I tried out Gnome-Shell, and it still needs a lot of work. It was nowhere near as fast as Compiz. I like the idea of its Activities screen, but I feel like it slows me down right now. Also, I would really like to be able to put the panel at the bottom, so I can have Chrome maximized and quickly switch tabs.
I like the concept, but it I think it will definitely help if they postpone it until September.
Edited 2009-11-11 22:35 UTC
I have been using gnome-shell as my default window manager since 2.28 was released.
There are things that are really lacking in places like the system menu not being in the activities list and i miss my top panel of icons.
As a day to day window manager i’ve decided to leave compiz/metacity behind. Mutter is smooth and fast and the learning curve for gnome-shell has been fairly short.
Compiz has never been that great a WM for me with all the bugs and issues it causes (not being able to click flash anyone?) and the biggest problem i’ve had with gnome-shell is a missing applet every now and again.
Right now i feel that Gnome 3 will be very solid and for now i’m happy to test out what’s coming in Gnome3 on Gnome2
Let’s propose that the text were rewritten as:
“As most of you will know, the Microsoft team is hard at work on Longhorn, the first major overhaul of the platform since 2002. The release of Longhorn was originally planned for March 2010, but it has now been pushed back for six months to September 2010.
“The reason is rather clear: the Microsoft team wants to ensure the quality of the release is up to snuff.”
Now imagine the comments… I think they might not be so accommodating.
I’m almost certain that GNOME is making the right call; but I also think it is being held to a much looser standard than some of its non-OSS competitors (to the extent that Windows, as a complete OS, can be said to compete with a DE).
Less trolling about a two years old KDE release.
That’s true, but the situation is quite different. Windows is a full OS which is sold, not only in stores, but on pre-built computers. All kinds of companies have to be ready for a new release of Windows and have to be able to sell it on the release date. Pushing the date back would cause all kinds of trouble for many companies other than Microsoft without even taking the customers into consideration.
OSS DEs are an entirely different can of worms. It’s the distributions that are the “full OS,” not the DEs. The DE, while an incredibly important part of a distro, is still just one part of it. And DEs certainly aren’t sold, so no stores or OEMs have to worry about having it in hand on the release date. Also, on the release date of the new version of a DE, that’s when the final code is released, not when any kind of physical product is released. So, the release date of a DE doesn’t mean quite the same thing. In addition, the various distros tend to either use the previous release of the DE, or they have development versions of it in their development or factory repositories as they prepare for their next release. Granted, if one of the major DEs were to announce a delay only a month before their release, that could seriously throw some distros off, but new versions of these DEs come out frequently enough and such warnings are given enough ahead of time, that the distros have plenty of time to prepare.
Microsoft delaying Windows would be closer to Novell delaying the next release of SLED than gnome delaying their next release. There’s really not much in common with an OSS DE being delayed and a proprietary OS like Windows being delayed.
I’m not surprised that the change has taken place – if one looks at the targets put forward regarding the deprecated components, it would have been overly ambitious to meet the target given the scope of what was wished to be accomplished. Take libcanvas for example where nothing yet has been done regarding Evolution. Then there are the numerous components within the GNOME stack that rely on HAL even though it has been deprecated for over 6months – I found it funny when a bugzilla submission was made regarding GIMP the only thing the GIMP developers could do was, “not my problem, sort it out yourself” (kind of reminds of their attitude to fixing up their UI).
There are many issues and even pushing it back to September 2010 is overly ambitious given if the submissions to meet the targets keep going at the current pace – the goal won’t be achieved until 2012 at the earliest. It is all very nice to talk about people volunteering but even in a voluntary organisation there has to be targets set and consequences if people don’t step up and meet this targets. Just as the chariety organisation who organises the soup kitchen expects volunteers to turn up when rostered, so should the programmers who are part of the GNOME desktop to step up and properly maintain their projects to meet the over all goal of 3.0.
Edited 2009-11-12 01:01 UTC
Yes. The problem with all of that, and the much talked about move to DeviceKit, is that the distributors who are generally involved in Gnome development simply don’t want to invest time and money in anything new. There just isn’t the wherewithall to do it.
I mean, who can blame them? Novell and Red Hat just don’t make money from work on desktops other than the bare minimum for where people use Linux workstations, and any new work that needs to be done on Gnome or anything graphically goes to the bottom of the pile. Havoc Pennington isn’t around any more to co-ordinate things so I think he’s a big miss. As for Ubuntu, there just isn’t much in the way of Gnome code being committed, despite the hype.
DeviceKit is no more, the ultimate move was actually to eventually migrate to libudev/gudev now that libudev is LGPL licensed. DeviceKit was only a stop gap measure.
Considering they were the ones who stated that they want the HAL dependency removed from the GNOME stack – I find it rather stupid stating one thing and allocating no resources to back it up.
The move from HAL to libudev isn’t just merely a GNOME issue given the system management tools that sit onto of Linux to make administration easier and thus lower the training and employment costs of linux admins. So it is in their best interest to clean things up.
Bugger me. I’ve lost all track then.
It’s happened before. They do something that has implications for the desktop side and then just don’t put the effort in.
Yeap, and the worse part, it isn’t just a small transition; it is a massive leap forward if they moved to libudev nice and cleanly. Ever since they introduced HAL it has been a downward spiral to craptacular problems. Fedora 11 has been the first version of Linux I have found that didn’t royally suck since finally moving away from HAL when it comes to handling storage devices. Since moving away from HAL, it has been reliable and each move away from it has improved reliability with each release. Confirming, much to the denial of the HAL developer, than HAL was the single vector for all of life’s problems.
Quite. To be honest I always found HAL a rather silly intermediary layer as udev now does everything that HAL sought to do pretty much.
I have no desire to get involved in these flame wars at all. They’ve gone on for years with nothing changing. The open source desktop doesn’t interest me simply because there is no distributor putting anything together that is terribly compelling, despite there being some decent open source software around.
Suffice it to say that if Gnome 3 isn’t based on anything tangible underneath, such as a new GTK 3, that developers can get hold of and actually create new and exciting stuff with, then Gnome 3 is a pipe dream.
From what I have seen thus far it’s devoid of any real vision or purpose other than to create a new-ish desktop shell and a version bump to create the impression that they’re innovating in some way to keep up. They’re still trying to pretend that they can flog the Gnome 2 architecture out to make the changes necessary to keep up with other desktops that surpassed them years ago. It’s keeping up appearances.
Edited 2009-11-12 01:23 UTC
I wonder what Hyacinth Bucket would do/like? What comments or trolling she would do?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bljtlQ_k4vk
The fact that the whole project has been pushed for 6 months means that its completely vapourware now. I will do just like KDE, when it’s 3.6 I might try it.
GNOME is reigning because he’s a one-eyed bastard in a world of blind folks. As for KDE, he’s a blind bastard.