Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 27th Jul 2012 12:41 UTC
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]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3
by Carewolf on Sat 28th Jul 2012 11:21
in reply to "RE: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3"
Member since:2005-09-08
You have to realize that Plasma was an attempt at doing things different and getting new developers.
KDE around the time of KDE4 was running into a similar issue that GNOME is now. KDE never had as many full-time developers, but many of the best contributors got married or was promoted to jobs where they no longer had time to contribute to KDE in their spare time. And while KDE has always had hundreds of application developers, the core-library team was bleeding, and new developers couldn't get in due to requirements of very high quality code and no feature regressions.
Plasma to begin with just a plan, sort of vaporware, it was a cool idea that anyone could take part in and it didn't require feature-for-feature compatibility with KDE 3.5, it just had to do something new and cool.
It worked, KDE got lots of new developers, who wrote slightly more buggy code than the old guys to begin with and the deadlines slipped and Plasma was not quite ready in KDE 4.0 or 4.1, but here years later, Plasma works great, and these "new" developers are the old skilled veterans maintaining KDE.
Btw. Please keep in mind that GNOME and KDE comunities are very different beasts . A few years ago, I think the stat was that GNOME had 50 full-time developers, and around 50 volunteers. KDE has less than 10 full-time developers, but more than 600 volunteers. Now KDE has around 5 full-time developers but around 800 actively contributing volunteers. When GNOME is loosing full-time developers, it is a big problem for them, they have to either get new corporate backers or change their community and recruit more volunteers.
RE[3]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3
by boudewijn on Sat 28th Jul 2012 12:24
in reply to "RE[2]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3"
Member since:2006-03-05
RE[3]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3
by segedunum on Sat 28th Jul 2012 13:44
in reply to "RE[2]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3"
Member since:2005-07-06
When GNOME is loosing full-time developers, it is a big problem for them, they have to either get new corporate backers or change their community and recruit more volunteers.
It's bigger than just Gnome. You have to remember that KDE benefitted from Qt in a massive way, and it is still building on all of the man-years of work in it, whereas Gnome and their backers have to constantly maintain and drive forwards GTK and all the underlying libraries that Gnome is built on. That's a task not to be underestimated when Red Hat and others are making nothing from the desktop side of things.
Personally I've never found Gnome a project that could be sustainable.
Edited 2012-07-28 13:45 UTC
RE[2]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3
by segedunum on Sat 28th Jul 2012 13:40
in reply to "RE: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3"
Member since:2005-07-06
Personally, my biggest beef with KDE4 is plasma. It's buggy as hell
No it isn't. After several years it's become pretty stable now and has allowed KDE to do an awful lot more than could ever have been possible with the old Kicker - or whatever the core of the desktop actually was back then. It's your view against mine.
Also, a minor annoyance with kde is that from a designer standpoint, everything seems designed with oxygen in mind. It seems that application designer has utilized oxygen-only features in the designs.....
I have no idea what that means. What designs?
RE[3]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3
by WereCatf on Sat 28th Jul 2012 15:42
in reply to "RE[2]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3"
Member since:2006-02-15
No it isn't. After several years it's become pretty stable now
I don't know why, but I still keep having Plasma crash on me every time I use KDE for more than 10 minutes. Granted, I have only tried KDE with Kubuntu on two different VMware machines, but I don't know if that really makes any difference.
RE[3]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3
by ple_mono on Sat 28th Jul 2012 21:58
in reply to "RE[2]: Personal views on the matter of Gnome 3"
Member since:2005-07-26
No it isn't. After several years it's become pretty stable now and has allowed KDE to do an awful lot more than could ever have been possible with the old Kicker - or whatever the core of the desktop actually was back then. It's your view against mine.
Well, maybe i worded that badly."buggy as hell" isn't quite true, but if there's any component of the KDE desktop i feel bugs out more often than the rest of the DE, then plasma is it. Misplaced widgets, missing redraw/resize and such for the most part.
I have no idea what that means. What designs?
Sorry about that. I meant that a majority of KDE applications, seeming to primarily be developed with the oxygen engine/style in mind, rather than staying "style-agnostic" if you will.
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Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
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2005-07-26
Personally, my biggest beef with KDE4 is plasma. It's buggy as hell, and they opted to build core components of the DE with it! Madness!
Also, a minor annoyance with kde is that from a designer standpoint, everything seems designed with oxygen in mind. It seems that application designer has utilized oxygen-only features in the designs, and when other styles is applied, it just looks bad.
IMHO an application should always be built with UI engine that is as "vanilla" as possible, sort of with a lowest common denominator as possible in mind, and then the style developers should build on that, not the other way around.