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Mod this off topic too!

The thread starter is arguably a troll, yes, but the post I replied to by nt jerkface was not and did not deserve any kind of negative mod.

I can't believe I'm defending nt jerkface... after all the mod points I've spent against him.

I see. It must be your conscience then I widely disagree with some of his comments, sometimes argue with him, very rarely mod people down. I haven't checked your moderation balance, but when I see people whose moderation is <50% positive, I always think that those are the kind of people that use moderation as a way of expressing disagreement. Not cool. As a rule, I only moderate someone down if he is factually wrong and misleading on purpose, and typical flamebaits of course.

The problem is that Ubuntu has ditched the default Gnome desktop shell environment for one that it is creating itself. To a greater or lesser extent that means that the Ubuntu developers feel that Gnome sucks. This mess really does nothing to expose the parent of this thread as a troll. In fact, it gives him ammunition.

What with the question being raised regarding using Qt as a development platform for Ubuntu people need to be asking what the state of Gnome is when it comes to Ubuntu and why it isn't doing what they want.

Indeed (as to the last part of your comment

The question is, why is this happening? Is Unity completely different from Gnome Shell? If they have completely different design philosophies, this move is understandable. However, this is not the first time some party decides that it is better to do it on their own instead of working with GNOME (as a project). Nokia, Intel and Novell comes to mind. See this:
http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/10/25/ubuntu-to-move-to-unity-as-...

Ironic, isn't it - I've been hearing that GNOME is more corporate friendly than KDE for years, how it has better corporate support than KDE... and now look how the tables have turned! The corporations cited above seem to use the GNOME framework, but not for working on GNOME (the desktop environment) itself. KDE got Nokia however, then Intel came on board. Granted, their focus is more on the toolkit than on KDE, but much of the capabilities and features of KDE depend on the toolkit.

So the question - why is this happening? My own theory is the closed development model of GNOME and politics. It seems to me that major UI decisions are made by a handful of people that disregard input from the community. This is just an impression, and in some cases, development works better this way. KDE tried another path, and even today it is being flamed for their early release of KDE4. Once KDE4 became API stable, they released it, got tremendous input from the community, worked on refining every aspect of the desktop (including the toolkit itself)...


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GNOME Shell, the most visible part of the changes in 3.0 (for the users anyway) is being ditched by one of the most prominent GNOME supporting distro. The release itself is being pushed back for the Nth time (KDE backlash?). And their response? Snarky remarks on Planet GNOME from their prominent developers:

So we are in a situation when almost none of the "traditional" GNOME supporting vendors work with the project. And yet, Michael Meeks (and others, I'm sure) seem to think that its their own fault. Intel's fault, Nokia's fault, Novell's fault (indeed, how retarted were they to develop compiz) and now, Canonical's fault. They should take the time and consider that maybe, just maybe there must be something wrong with the way they manage the project instead of pointing fingers to everyone else.