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.
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.
Sadly, this didn’t turn out very well. Many GNOME 2 users were upset because GNOME 3 had little to nothing in common with what came before, and it seemed explicitly designed to be as inflexible as possible. It felt more like an idealised concept designed for users from a perfect fairytale kingdom than for actual, real-world users. Personally, I quickly lost interest because it was clear to me that as a big fan of the straightforwardness of GNOME 2.x I was no longer part of GNOME’s target user group. No hard feelings though – projects change focus, it happens.
The marketplace, if you can call it as such, didn’t like GNOME 3 either. The biggest GNOME advocate up until then, Ubuntu, didn’t like GNOME 3’s direction, and early on started working on Unity. Mint, another popular Linux distribution, ignored GNOME 3 as well, and is working on the Cinnamon project.
A shrinking userbase obviously has consequences: less developers. Not only the influx of new blood suffers, but old blood is leaving the project as well, and currently, GNOME is understaffed. “For anecdotal numbers: GTK has 1 person working full-time on it (me). Glib doesn’t even have that. I think Evolution is in a similar situation (a complete email client)”, Otte notes, “We can also try Ohloh’s statistics for GNOME (they include 131 packages, including GStreamer and NetworkManager). You’ll see a sharp drop off of committers on the first page already which suggests around 20 full-time developers at most.”
Anecdotal or no, such numbers do not bode well when you take the sheer size of the GNOME project into account. This is not a project that can be succesfully developed by a handful of developers – it needs more than that. And, Otte points out, the situation is only getting worse, since traditional GNOME/Gtk supporters, like SUSE and Nokia, are backing down.
Lastly, he explains, GNOME has no goals, and without goals, there’s no direction, nor a way to measure yourself. “In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a ‘community that makes great software’, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development,” he states, “The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places.”
In my view, this is what happens when you make software for hypothetical users, instead of for real users. It’s great to have all sorts of ideas about how users should work and developer a user interface to match, but if users don’t actually work that way at all, you’re left with an environment nobody wants to use. Microsoft can take such a gamble with Metro because it will ship on every computer anyway; GNOME does not have that luxury.
I’m getting the feeling these concerns aren’t exactly new, and that a solution isn’t exactly right around the corner. GNOME took a gamble, and it isn’t working out. I’m sure we’ll see enough comments from people who like GNOME 3, but there’s simply not enough of you. That doesn’t mean GNOME 3 sucks – it simply means it isn’t popular enough to sustain itself.
Add to all this the fact that GNOME has zero presence on the next wave of devices (tablets and smartphones) and the picture is complete – and dire. Sadly, I’m afraid heels will be dug into the sand regarding GNOME 3, and we’ll see a doubling-down on an environment people simply don’t want, instead of trying to find out what users do want.
We’ll see.
Gnome 3 should have been the tablet gui version of Gnome, ala what kde did.
Yes, but possible Gnome was already understaffed to pull through both efforts (desktop and mobile designs). Or they considered it not important. KDE made that distinction clear from the start (i.e. Plasma for desktop and PlasmaActive for mobile). Unfortunately for Gnome, ignoring that distinction is a bad idea.
Edited 2012-07-27 22:36 UTC
KDE folks didn’t make any distinction either – KDE4 was designed around 2006-2007 when there were no such things as tablets or touch interfaces. To my mind the KDE desktop is out-dated and legacy, not something we should make a glorified example of Things Done Right.
I remember people using Nintendo DS, and that was launched in 2004.
At the time of KDE4 the discussion was not desktop vs tablet, it was desktop vs netbook and with dreams of being on a mobile phone at some point, so right from the get go KDE4 (well Plasma actually) was designed to have multiple different interfaces using a shared framework but providing very different experiences
And plasma-desktop vs plasma-netbook was a great separation that worked really well. Surprisingly enough, plasma-netbook works equally well on full desktop systems, even going back to Ubuntu 8.04 / 9.10 days.
Haven’t looked into PlasmaActive as yet.
I don’t know how since KDE is actually a Unix/Linux desktop that works and has the underlying framework to make what they did with KDE 4 (i.e. keeping pace with Vista/7/OS X) onwards sustainable. From that point of view it is certainly an example of Things Done Right(tm).
If KDE is outdated and legacy I really have no idea what that makes Gnome, or where that puts the state of open source desktops.
Firstly I see nothing outdated there, it’s functional and good/modern looking, modular and extensible.
Secondly, the distinction obviously appeared when the idea of tablets was widely introduced. That’s what I meant by “from the start”. I.e. from the start of tablets period KDE made an effort to approach them with distinct design, while Gnome didn’t.
Edited 2012-07-29 03:33 UTC
I think the underlying toolkit (Qt) helped enormously in this case. TrollTech and later Nokia were already adding support for declaratively defined touch interfaces via Qt Quick.
KDE could quickly leverage Quick for touch interfaces, and there already is a sort of separation in the Qt toolkit between the old Qt (desktop) widgets and Qt Quick.
The fact that you have to add a bunch of extensions just to get basic desktop functionality back into GNOME3 is just absolutely ridiculous to me
ridiculous squared. the second ridiculous part is the distro designer who carbon copied the problem.
linux distros are fishermen, not chefs. they make this great effort to pull stuff together… and then they’re done. they’re no good at producing a final result.
apparently all the good chefs are being paid to feed paying customers.
Gnome shell is fantastic….. once you install various PPAs to get the latest builds, PPAs to get user themes extensions, and of course tweak tool.
Gnome shell is build on a incredibly flexible and customizable framework, the MASSIVE PROBLEM is the default settings for lack of a better term, suck ass, .. and donkey too.
The so desperately NEED TO HAVE TWEAK TOOL INTEGRATED INTO CONTROL PANEL! and user themes need to be part of the default install.
Gnome shell allows for insane levels of customizability via javascript, but this insanity of hiding all of this fantastic work is well, just insane.
On a side note, the only other thing really missing, is a drag and drop way of adding non-repository apps to the app view and dock, sort of like Mac has had since freaking 1984 and Windows have had since what 1990? For example, I grab the latest eclipse, because the one in the repos is ancient. Then I either have to edit some dammed .desktop files, or open up the dammed menu editor, this is crazy.
NeXT beautifully solved this in 1993, when a folder has a .app file extension, the file manager, (Nautilus, Dolphin, Finder, whatever) looks inside for a config file that says what icon this ‘app’ should use, and what the executable is. That freaking simple. Basically, a self-contained .desktop file. This is all you need for drag and drop installs. This idea of self contained apps is also completely desktop independent.
Why don’t I help?, well, I’ve fixed numerous bugs in the current builds of Gnome shell + extensions, but as a grad student, sadly, I don’t have a great deal of time to devote to … anything.
So, Gnome Shell is a fantastic environment, please stop hiding all this goodness. Its so ridiculously simple to have self contained, desktop independent apps, all we need is some people to agree on this.
I must agree about the possibiliteis of gnome-shell. Gnome did however alienate a great many users by not supporting a fully functional replica of the gnome2 layout/desktop with gnome3 though. The fallback did fall far short of being a polished alternative to the old desktop. If they had done that from the start, people could have been eased in to the gnome-shell rather than forced as it is now.
I fully agree about the current application (binary/data) model needs to be replaced or augmented (lets call it modernized, shall we?), this is not a gnome issue though.
Indeed. If the gnome “people” (for lack of a better term) would’ve “pleased” the masses from the get-go, mint and ubuntu might still be using gnome, and the mindshare wouldn’t be lost. It’s a damn mess right now. If you design a theme you need to do unity/gtk2/gtk3/metacity/mutter/gnome/shell adjustments for both themes and icon sets. I’m sure that applies to development practises as well (quick lists, indicators, applets etc). Fragmentation much?
It’s too bad because gnome-shell is tight, integrated, fairly minimalistic, snappy and modular. But i’m afraid it’s already too late. The momentum might already be lost.
And it lacks a little thing: Speed.
Damn, this thing is sluggish on my e350 AMD processor.
I know i don’t have a “top” hardware, but KDE with all functionalities and Kontact syncing contacts and mails with Gmail, kwallet enabled, amarok launching at the startup and facebook widgets, works a way more faster than Gnome3.
And yes, my video driver is correctly installed.
Cannot stand either GNOME 3 or Unity, and frankly its pushing me to more obscure distros that function out of the box…
Well, you can always use Lubuntu/Xubuntu or Mint.
Basically Ubuntu with a different DE, it’s not THAT obscure!
Cannot stand either GNOME 3 or Unity, and frankly its pushing me to more obscure distros that function out of the box…
Well, there’s always KDE… you don’t really need to go too obscure with your desktop system.
They actually (eventually) did a fairly decent job with the transition to KDE4.
Linux Mint KDE edition is a really nice OS.
Edited 2012-07-27 14:45 UTC
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…)
90’s Powerbook G4?
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.
This is the saddest part in my opinion. GNOME is no longer a collection of “programs that do one thing and do it well”. Whether it’s true or not, GNOME applications feel like they have tight coupling, which would make it hard for a new developer to contribute.
GNOME shouldn’t be concerned with getting more developers to work on “GNOME”. Instead, it should be a few people contributing to the small sections that interest them. If no one is interested in working on them, then they fade away or get replaced by something better. If being so tightly integrated with all of GNOME makes this very hard, then people will just not want to do anything with it.
Does that make sense, or am misunderstanding the GNOME project?
I have to agree with you. I also liked the design ideology that one Gnome application did only one thing and it did it well. Since Gnome 2 things have been going into direction they shouldn’t have gone in the first place.
But Gnome project needs more flexible management and less obscure copy design from other desktop environments. And instead of going the route of follower they should be showing the way others should go to. They need capable desktop designers and they need to concentrate on issues. But they kind of did lead a way with the Gnome 3 being kind of tablet friendly.
That’s the Unix design ideology and you can find it everywhere on your Linux down and up the stack. On the commandline, in your Webbrowser and on your desktop may it be KDE, XFCE or LXDE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#McIlroy:_A_Quarter_Cen…
At least they are showing the way others should NOT go to. Its just to late since Microsoft Windows 8 is RTM already.
Edited 2012-07-27 22:27 UTC
Putting aside the delusions of the other reply to your post (because no, *nix didn’t manage to stay very true to its original philosophy; we even had an news piece about it not a long time ago http://www.osnews.com/story/26000/Unix_doesn_t_follow_the_Unix_phil… ) – LXDE (and the applications it ships with & ~promotes) mostly manages to stay like that, so far.
I personally think that Gnome as a project has had some serious problems and issues right from the beginning. It started as a way to troll KDE project (excuse me for the lack of better way to express how Gnome founders wanted completely GPL-safe and compatible desktop. I remember how Qt wasn’t entirely safe to use back then).
Then they made a descent desktop which had some design issues and limitations due the use of widget set not meant for the complete desktop usage. Their objective of having complete C desktop was also pretty ridiculous in a modern desktop design. UNIX families of OSes didn’t have a common desktop in the first place and only thing that came even close to being that standard was CDE which should have been the staring point of the design instead of copying Windows 9X series of desktops.
Then the Gnome project actually managed to produce completely different desktop environment which still had some serious design issues but at least it was functional albeit it had some serious bugs. And Nautilus was the worst file manager I had ever laid my hands on (yes, even worse than the Mac OSes “F*” Finder). Midnight Commander was and still is a master piece I still use since it works. Gnome 2 is where the design shift was made towards copying the OS X and they actually managed to take the relevant parts in in a series of well refining releases making Gnome 2 very popular desktop. But that didn’t hide all the issues it had underneath in technical wise.
Gnome 3 steps in here. It’s technically very very good desktop. I’ve had some time playing around with it and testing some of the frameworks and I like it. But Gnome 3 desktop designers went too much into OS X’s closed direction and didn’t quite understand how to build a functionality into it and opted not to hide it (like Apple does) but completely remove it from the visible eyes. That has alienated tons of Gnome 2 users completely and made them KDE or XFCE users.
KDE has also some serious issues being wanna be windows desktop environment. Their biggest problem is probably the fact that they’re not trying to hide any functionality at all. KDE as a desktop is f* cool but at the same time it makes no sense at times. I have to admit thought that I use KDE and I’ve been using KDE since the KDE 2 was out. And I like Qt. But I hope I’m not labeled as a fanboy. I do like both Gnome and KDE but KDE is my first choice because it’s flexible. Gnome is inflexible and that’s how it meant to be. The Very inflexibility of Gnome made it popular and now it has made it not so popular.
I could start a story about Gnome project management issues but this short outburst is already starting to get out of hands…
Edited 2012-07-27 13:55 UTC
Is it though? It’s been said that some of Microsoft’s patents even list KDE as prior art.
http://derstandard.at/1313025130807/Interview-Aaron-Seigo-talks-abo…
Since using Windows 7 for the past few years, I’ve found myself much more comfortable in KDE when I have to use it. I know that’s purely anecdotal, but really if you spend five minutes tweaking KDE and put it side by side with Windows 7 you would see a lot more similarities than differences.
Same here.
Even the case when you compare Windows 7 or KDE with OSX. They are all not so different when compared to GNOME 3. I see a pattern.
Edited 2012-07-27 22:32 UTC
But I’d say that it was Windows 7 designers who mimicked KDE ideas, not other way around. So calling KDE a “wanna be” Windows is wrong. If something, Windows 7 is a “wanna be” KDE.
That’s actually the point I was trying to make. Windows 7 to me looks a lot like KDE 3.5 with some 4.x thrown in for eye candy purposes.
Yes it is. Some details and fancying out aside, the whole UI model is very similar to Windows (and with good reason – in the regions which can be largely described as the cradle of KDE, Macs generally hardly existed back then, it was basically all about Windows).
Just look how it started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_Beta3.png – and it didn’t drastically change since then.
Though I wouldn’t really call that “some serious issues” – it certainly helped adoption, what they aimed at with such similar look (I know of few uni computer labs, of web cafe kind & at non-technical departments, which used KDE largely because of that similarity)
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.
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.
I don’t think I’ve seen the difference summarized so succinctly and well before 🙂
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
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.
I have no idea what that means. What designs?
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.
I really wonder what you are doing then… There must be something rather particular that you _always_ do within ten minutes that causes a crash. I wonder if it would be possible for you to make a video of your first ten minutes until the crash so we can try to figure out what that particular action that most other people don’t execute is.
I’ve had the same thing happen (KDE crashes/locks up after 10-20 minutes) and that was on bare metal, Arch Linux, and Intel video hardware. I popped in an Nvidia card and even with the binary driver it would crash or lock up, so that ruled out video issues. I gave up and went back to Xfce on that machine (which has since been retired). That was less than a year ago.
And this wasn’t cheap slap-together hardware. I learned a very long time ago to buy workstation-class hardware from HP, Dell and Lenovo exclusively for production machines. This was an HP business class desktop that was rock-solid under Windows and any Linux DE/WM apart from KDE.
Yes.. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, and I do have a certain confirmation bias here, because of the eight laptops in this house, seven are lenovo, one is asus and all of them plus the desktop have an intel card, so not much variety, but nobody has a crashing plasma desktop. That, and the fact that millions of people do use KDE4 daily, does mean that plasma crashing is not the usual thing, which in turn means that investigation is needed to figure out why that crashes for you and werecatf.
Unfortunately, I’m just a lowly application developer myself, so I don’t track the plasma bugs. But if you have a bug with a backtrace, maybe I can get some bright idea about what’s going on anyway 🙂
I know this will sound crazy, but I think in my case it was a KMS thing, because on that same system, Gnome 3 refused to run with gnome-shell and went into fallback mode, which then immediately crashed as well. It crashed more gracefully, dumping X altogether and putting me back at the command line (I rarely use a login manager). In KDE, instead of dumping X it locked up the video frame buffer (as near as I can tell) and I had to force kill X from another login shell.
After a couple of kernel updates, I was finally able to get Gnome to launch properly in gnome-shell on both the Intel GMA and the Nvidia card. I still had lockups in KDE though.
Again, this was all about a year ago on hardware I’ve since reloaded with Windows and sold to a client, so unfortunately I can’t provide a bug report. I also have stopped using Arch Linux altogether for unrelated reasons.
Aw, then there isn’t much anybody can do, is there? Pity 🙁
> I’ve had the same thing happen (KDE crashes/locks up after
> 10-20 minutes)
Hi!
I just wanted to say that KDE and Kubuntu work in a stable way in four computers that I manage and in two computers that manages an acquaintance of mine.
There’s a “VirtualBox disk image of Kubuntu 11.04 i386 Desktop, stable version” on
http://min.us/mX2I0UnLl
to conduct experiments on it.
I usually also employ a copy of it as a virtual machine and it works stably.
Using a virtual machine, we avoid the problems of drivers that need development, driver developments that need funding, companies that hide details of their hardware and so it hinders driver developments, etc.
About it, there is a README.txt on http://min.us/lrL47umKRwqLn
If you have any doubt, on this thread you can make questions. Thanks!
Well, usually it’s just the simple action of moving the taskbar/panel to the top of the screen instead of bottom that tends to crash Plasma. No idea why.
Me neither… Half my employees have their panel up top, one on the left and the rest at the bottom. I just tried it and no crash. Do you have a bug with a backtrace? As I said just now, I’m not a plasma developer, but who know, I might be able to figure something out. It cannot be harder than figuring out why some wacom drivers on windows work fine with krita, and others make krita enormously slow… (Not that I managed to figure out why that happens either, more’s the pity).
Hi!
There’s a “VirtualBox disk image of Kubuntu 11.04 i386 Desktop, stable version” on
http://min.us/mX2I0UnLl
to conduct experiments on it.
I usually employ a copy of it as a virtual machine and it works stably.
I’ve tried to launch it, move the taskbar/panel to the top of the screen ( following the steps of http://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/6/66/Plasma_howto-panel-mov… ), do my usual operations ( but inside of that machine ) and a lot of minutes later, it hasn’t crashed and continues working while I keep on doing what I had to do.
If you have any doubt, on this thread you can make questions.
About it, there is a README.txt on http://min.us/lrL47umKRwqLn
Using a virtual machine, we avoid the problems of drivers that need development, driver developments that need funding, companies that hide details of their hardware and so it hinders driver developments, etc.
Edited 2012-07-29 08:03 UTC
Well, video drivers are finicky things and apparently they are in Gnome 3, but, ever since about 4.2 or 4.3 I’ve been able to use KDE and openSUSE quite happily for 8 hours every day for work. I have quite a few ‘Plasmoids’ installed and do quite a bit of file management and sys admin work. I don’t think it gets much more intensive than that.
I’ve had openSUSE’s silly applet updater crash a few times, but that’s about it.
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.
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.
I am using the Plastiq-style all of the time and did not note any problems there but then maybe I am to used to it. Can you please give an example for that so we know what you refer to?
I’m curious as to why you feel that way. I personally very much liked Nautilus: it didn’t try to include a full kitchen-sink in its functionality, it just provided a clean view on my files, all the most important data about them and let me do all the most common operations on them quickly and without a hassle.
I think it’s been pretty clear that Nautilus has been running on empty for some time. It was a file manager that had a huge amount of investment put into it (Eazel, Helix code) for very little results. Evolution was another example, and as an aside they are two software projects that told me that Gnome collectively just wasn’t sustainable.
The fact is that in a file manager people want to move and copy files around easily (pretty basic) and that means a certain amount of reasonable functionality and an interface for the purpose. Spatial browsing was and is quite simply not it and it is no surprise they had to move back. Handling multiple folders and devices to copy and move files is most certainly not ‘advanced’ functionality or providing the ‘kitchen sink’. People have come to expect to be able to do some file management in open/save dialogues because it is just far easier than opening up another application or turning on a bunch of settings. People do that every day with Explorer on Windows and there is a reason why there is a burgeoning market in third-party file managers on the Mac.
I always get somewhat suspicious of people who use the phrase ‘kitchen sink’ or the word ‘clean’. It either tells me that they’re trying to cover up for shortcomings in a piece of software or they are not doing anything of very much use.
Edited 2012-07-28 14:23 UTC
Nautilus made a long way, but first versions were so heavyweight it crawled on shiniest gear.
It got a lot of optimizations and hardware got faster.
sure it is a modern desktop. It’s probably a very nice thing for home users too. But it’s a step in the wrong direction for open source desktops.
Linux is no longer some toy. it’s a professional operating system. Do you think someone is going to run gnome-shell or unity at work?
Edited 2012-07-27 13:54 UTC
And what exactly should constitute an ‘open source desktop’? I last used Gnome 2 six months ago, and it’s barely changed from the days when it was still known as ‘Mac OS 7.1’ – i.e. 20 year-old GUI idioms, barely changed over all those years. (Still not as bad as its CLI, mind you, which is mired in 1970s-era design, or persistent storage, which is 1950s.)
The fundamental failing of all the mainstream Linux DEs – not just the GUI shells but the apps that run on them too – is that they all play to the competition’s – i.e. MS and Apple – strengths when instead they ought to be playing to their own – i.e. *nix – strengths. Everyone involved in creating the first Linux desktops instantly forgot everything they ever knew about Unix Philosophy: keep everything small, simple, highly modular, endlessly composable, agile, adaptable. [1]
Instead, they built up these huge, grand palaces, fine testaments to their own mastery of sophistication and complexity, but insanely time-consuming and expensive to construct and maintain, and horribly bad at adapting to changing circumstances and requirements.
FWIW, the Linux GUI folks aren’t the only ones to fall into this trap – web framework developers are also notorious for it, as is C++ where the answer to every question on how to improve it is invariably ‘add another kitchen sink’.
The problem is this: the likes of Apple and Microsoft, who possess sufficient material resources that they can afford to get away with such a high-cost, high-maintenance strategy. Whereas OSS communities simply do not have the spending power to keep up with them; by the time they’ve constructed their own edifices, they can barely afford the existing upkeep, never mind the aggressive experimentation and evolution needed to keep it moving forward. Nor can they afford to throw away such a massive monolithic investment as that means starting over again from scratch. So they creak along year after year; okay, the lack of change may appeal to the strongly conservative nature of the majority of Linux nerds/geeks, but I would hope even they would eventually admit that such a strategy means they will forever be left trailing in the wake of the Big Two, with absolutely zero chance of ever jumping out ahead.
Let’s call the above approach the ‘Intel strategy’. Yes, x86 architecture sucks, but Intel are so incredibly wealthy that they are able to ameliorate its worst failings simply by throwing vast quantities of raw resources at it. What the Linux GUI folks need to adopt is an ‘ARM strategy’: don’t even try to compete with Intel’s approach to the problem; instead, develop a nimble, low-cost strategy that plays to your own unique strengths, redefining the problem itself where appropriate to better accommodate these goals, and do an end-run right around the competition.
I mean, consider just one problem: developing a word processor. Outsiders may not think it’d be such a hard problem (it’s only one step up from a simple text editor, right?), but in fact just dealing with Middle East and Far East scripts alone is sufficient to put 20 years on even the strongest, smartest developer. LibreOffice copies Microsoft’s approach: vast powerful monolith achieved through brute strength. Looks very impressive, but what a vast waste of an opportunity: completely inflexible structure, no feature reuse across other apps, requires a major commitment and loads of time and work to become a developer on it. Conventional commercial vendors can afford not to care about this – if anything, it’s a valuable marketing tool, ensuring mass user lock-in. OSS folks though need to squeeze every single line of code, every single minute of developer and tester time, in order to extract every last possible ounce of value they can. Which is, of course, the sort of ‘work smart, not hard’ approach that Unix Philosophy is all about.
Now, you might think discussion of application architecture is irrelevant to the subject of DE development, but it’s absolutely everything: DEs exist solely for the purpose of running applications, so the whole philosophy and construction of the DE inevitably dictate the philosophy and construction of all the applications that run on it.
Off the top of my head, the only Linux DE project whose philosophy is anywhere close is Etoile. Although the notion of a component-based desktop is not new. For instance, consider Apple’s OpenDoc, which they abandoned at least partly because it did undermine the vendor-lock-in advantage of giant monolithic apps, ensuring that the main commercial app vendors (Adobe, MS) would never want to adopt it. With the technical issues ironed out I could see such an architecture being a terrific, natural fit for Linux DEs, precisely because it’d play so well to OSS strengths. Make it work, and all of a sudden Linux has a Unique Selling Point that the commercial DEs cannot directly compete on because it’s against their interests to replicate it.
And that is what an OSS desktop should be.
…
That’s all about where Linux should be heading though. Getting back to where it is today, especially with regard to Gnome 3?
IMO, wind up the entire Gnome project and close it down in orderly fashion. There are far too many poorly differentiated Linux DEs as it is – a period of consolidation in the immediate future would do them all a world of good, allowing more resources to be focused on fewer, more distinctive projects. If we’re being brutally honest about it, all Linux really needs to cover all current bases are three production DEs: e.g. Unity as the everyman DE, KDE for the cool kids who love their endless bells and whistles, and Mint for the crusty old conservatives who like their desktops 1980s-style, thankyewverymuch.
All the folks left over by such a consolidation can then go spend some time getting individual GUI apps polished up a bit more (Dog knows most of them seriously need it). A few might even crack open their extremely dusty copies of the Art of Unix Programming, and think about how to apply all that forgotten wisdom to inventing a brand new OSS DE that follows Unix Philosophy through and through – one that doesn’t simply continue the tradition of trailing way back in the wake of Windows and OSX/iOS, but instead completely outsmarts and performs an end-run right around them.
[1] http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html
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.)
Good read! Thanks. I like your thinking.
Probably – but I can’t help feeling Cinnamon is wrong, all it is is Gnome Shell with a few extensions. Mint certainly have a handle on what a lot of users want, but if I could choose I’d have the Gnome Shell folk work with the Cinnamon folk to produce a default Gnome Shell that the more conservative users want and evolve it from there.
Perhaps Thom is right
Shame
Cinnamon wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the actions of Gnome Shell people. I’d guess the Cinnamon people would much prefer to develop upstream, but I doubt the Gnome would welcome them..
Edited 2012-07-28 13:56 UTC
Nice rant, but I can’t agree with most of it.
Unix programming (and philosophy) have not attempted to produce anything significant on the GUI/productivity front. It’s best in network services and HPC but the computing world have long moved forward from these basic concepts in the last 30 years.
Unix desktops are unusable by today standards.
You miss DEs that are not slavishly trailing Windows / Apple lead and look their own ways. There’s plenty of them (e.g. GnuStep, E17), and they have their loyal following (that’s as you admitted is enough to sustain them). But they are still the minority after years.
I second the OpenDoc argument. A huge missed opportunity by IBM, who could donate it do community 15 years ago, letting talented people like Miguel de Icaza to focus on writing functionality people actually care about.
About killing Gnome: as said not much would be saved by it as they don’t have much contributions anyway. Besides you largely miss the political and philosophical factors. Gnome vs. KDE was always somehow US approach vs European approach fight. You can’t assume the same people would easily switch sides and support the other one. Besides, you can’t have Unity w/o Gnome anyway.
My comment to the situation, Linux users want a tweak-ability and choice but few on the realize that every choice increases support complexity and testing exponentially. There’s simply not enough people in the community (and living in the planet earth for that matter) to test and polish all the combinations these people demand available.
Philosophies don’t write code; developers write code. It’s up to Linux developers to apply Unix philosophy in their designs, not the other way about. And where they fail to do so, they’ve no-one to blame for the resulting monolithic monsters but themselves.
I think part of the problem is that the early Unix designers were forced to employ humble parsimony by the extreme scarcity of hardware resources back in their day, but modern generations are spoiled by the massive glut of such resources in today’s systems, allowing for the establishment of fat, grandiose designs that lack any hard checks against their own short-sightedness. They need to force themselves to be humble and parsimonious from day 1, so that by day 4000 they have not sunk beneath their own vast weight.
e.g. Me, I’m forced to employ such parsimony in my own work simply because I am not all that bright and my memory has all the capacity and reliability of a wobbly 16K RAM pack. So when I write a complex system, I put most of the effort into reducing or eliminating complexity as much as possible. Modern technology, highly reliant on high-level IPC and component-based construction to divide and minimise the solid core so it’s as small and manageable as possible. e.g. When I needed to implement my own scripting language, I based it on the sort of simple Scheme interpreter they used to teach CS students to build in college; very high power-to-weight ratio as a result. Only the core data types are built in; all the actual functionality exists as plugins, even fundamentals like defining variables and performing flow control. And I’m just an art school drop-out and general bum, so the rest of you should have no excuses whatsoever.
Pish and nonsense. Unix philosophy just doesn’t favour Highly-Paid Enterprise Consultants who build their fortunes by creating their own problems to solve, and big-name proprietary OS and application vendors who benefit from the user lock-in business model, is all.
And even if we do limit ourselves to applying Unix philosophy to networks, what is a component-based framework such as OpenDoc if not a single-purpose network in itself?
I’ve been posting even longer rambles over in the hierarchical file system thread, most of which boil down to “So why exactly are we treating local (disk) data storage and remote (network) data storage as two utterly different things?” I frequently see very smart programmer types mentally slicing up service provision requirements according to technical implementation. Me, I approach the same challenge as a UI problem, and look at it in terms of overall usage patterns. They see the all the little differences: “disk vs network”. I spot the broad commonality: “data storage”. Which is actually the more crucial of the two? Ruthlessly consolidating overlapping ideas and squashing them down into their simplest common form is one of the core activities of Unix philosophy. So, for example, the Unix file system interface does double-duty as local storage and IPC mechanism. That’s the sort of brilliant craftsmanship and creative efficiency that all OSS DE inventors should bring to their own work.
But how many of these DEs adhere to Unix philosophy throughout their construction? External appearance is irrelevant; it’s the rules they set down on how each brick should be placed together that makes all the difference. And even that by itself is not enough. A DE that achieves Unix philosophy within itself but still only runs the same old monolithic slabs of apps that infect all the mainstream DEs has also failed to bring enlightenment to the OSS desktop as a whole. Remember, a DE’s value resides in the apps it runs. If the apps are all rubbish, the DE’s ultimately worthless.
It’s the old ‘work smart, not hard’ mantra: OSS simply doesn’t have the vast time and manpower resources that Adobe, Apple, MS, etc can use to brute-force hammer their own giant monolithic apps into being somewhat decent.
Another anecdote: I have, for my many sins, just spent the last decade mastering Apple event IPC. (I’m perhaps one of a dozen folk in existence who truly grok it all the way down to its very bones. That’s not a good reflection on me, mind; rather a poor reflection on everyone else.)
Amusingly enough, right after its birth in System 7, Apple shot the whole AE system in the kneecaps just so they could send a couple of its engineers to go get OpenDoc “ready to throw away” (as one internet wag memorably phrased it). Under pressure from their publishing users (back then still a key market), they tried reinvigorating all the AppleScript/Apple event stuff for OS X, but still didn’t really understand what it was about and unsurprisingly made a bit of a muck of it, again. Few years later, they invented Automator as a less granular approach to desktop automation (Duplo blocks to AppleScript’s Technics, not that there’s anything wrong with that). Futzed that too.
A large part of the problem: you can’t add componentization onto the side of an already monolithic app and expect to achieve wonders. You have to follow that philosophy from the ground up. And rather than build one giant does-everything app, build several small, simple ones that do one thing apiece and do it well, and ensure they can easily and effectively talk to one another. (My favourite target of hate here: email clients with built-in address book and calendaring facilities. Should be three separate applications every time.) And that’s just with your classical application-centric desktop; if you go full-hog along the OpenDoc route (as a truly *nix desktop should), that pattern will be implicitly ubiquitous anyway.
Two things:
1. Linux DEs need to learn when to say NO to the tweakaholics. (GNOME, to its credit, did try.) When they whinge (as they invariably do), hit them hard with the LART stick. Repeat for as long as they continue to understand the value of everything and the cost of nothing. Simultaneous to this, be aware that having really a good, logical, intuitive default design in the first place really helps to take any legitimacy out of their complaints, and that this may require some hard investment too.
2. Linux developers need to remember that any time they’re seeing exponential growth in something, it’s a damn clear sign they’re using an O(N*N) [or worse] algorithm instead of an O(N) or O(N*log N) one. Redesign the algorithm, which in this case is their whole DE construction philosophy. The CLI developers don’t have it anywhere near that bad, and it’s not like their habits are particularly rigorous.
LXDE can be probably considered quite mainstream by now, and is relatively “*nix philosophy” …so far (so good)
Also, you mention word processors, and there is a whole collection of tools filling largely that role and in a “proper” philosophy: TeX and so on (also quite easy to use LyX) – problem is, people don’t seem to want to use such too much, preferring the ~closed monolith model which allows them to manually tweak the layout (with usually much poorer results than a proper typesetting system would give)
Lol. Nice profile picture, hussam.
I use Unity and work and at home.
Edited 2012-07-27 20:07 UTC
Yeah, but you’re Swedish, so it doesn’t count – you’re notoriously batshit crazy
I run gnome-shell at work (writing software for L3 switches) and it’s great. Before I could use gnome-shell I set up gnome2 to look like gnome-shell… just because you have an opinion doesn’t make it fact!!
Choice is good, but when it comes to Linux succeeding, it needs ONE GOOD face. I don’t care what it is as long as it’s one, and not metro-like.
maybe if your idea of success is market share. However, the reason I prefer using Linux over osx and windows is that I can choose my desktop gui. If I want a lighter and faster desktop I can choose openbox, dwm, or another window manger. If I want something more feature packed and heavier I can choose xfce, gnome, or KDE. Easy to change at bootup depending on what I want at that time. To me, that is the real strength of Linux and other open OS’s – freedom of choice. I think locking into a desktop gui and not allowing the easy change to another would hurt not help GNU/Linux.
It is pretty universally accepted idea… plus it brings tons of network effects, feedback loops – making a given OS clearly better than most of its past (and dead) contenders; even if initially it wasn’t necessarily so.
And if I want a lighter and faster desktop on Windows I can choose bbLean or LDE(X). If something more fancied out, Emerge or Litestep. Easy to change even after bootup …you just run a shell you want.
Also, freedom of software choices (Linux software is typically available for Windows, but that’s rarer the other way around).
But the point is, it presents widely adopted defaults, which are also quite decent.
It did already succeed and has that face. Android. Just a matter of time till your have a desktop-optimized version running on your desktop too. More sooner then later.
Edited 2012-07-27 22:38 UTC
Amen!
Then we don’t win, Google does.
You can apply that logic also, for example, to XFCE when it wins the Linux Desktop race but you happen to be WindowManager fan.
Android is a Linux based opensource product. You can take it, change it, remove/add/edit code and redistribute when you are not happy about whatever.
Face it, Android is “us” and you have the freedom to make it “me” by e.g. forking. Do it if you like but not complain if you don’t. If you rather like to work on a compitor then, by all means, do that but not complain “Android is not we” when your compitor does not gain similar marketshare since what you really mean is “Android is not my invention” what is a huge difference.
Edited 2012-07-29 03:05 UTC
Uh, no, not really. XFCE is developed by a group of volunteers, who seem to want to build a pretty good desktop environment. Android is developed by Google, who want to know everything there possibly is to know about you so they can make money for their shareholders by selling ads.
I’ll take the volunteers over the corporate overlords any day of the week.
Oh, and while I write some code for work now and then, to think that me, or most of the people who use Android could possibly fork the code and manage a distribution with all the data mining cleaned out, well, that’s just absurd.
I’d even take MS over Google when it comes to desktop operating systems, at least MS is watched to closely to get away with anything. Everyone just trusts Google as they sit back and watch everything you do.
Edited 2012-07-29 03:50 UTC
Android is the base for lot of projects run completely by volunteers who offer modified Android versions for hardware not even the manufactors themself support any longer. Most code in Android was or is done by communities, volunteers, other companies then google. That are facts.
As I wrote: if the problem is that its not you controlling development then fork it. Android is FLOSS so you can!
You also seem to confuse Android with Google Ads and draw somehow the conclusion Android is unfree. I still do not follow you on that but like to ask you something related: The SELinux security-framework was done by the NSA. They know lots about you and me. More then google and Microsoft combined cause they have access to there data and much more. So, is Linux unfree for you too?
Also would it become free/us if you fork Android? If yes, then something is wrong in your logic. If not, why not?
You claim forking is absurd cause nobody can remove all the “data mining” from Android? Do you try to be serious or is that a joke? If you try to be serious and now that we know you CAN code, please point me to one single file in Android JB that contains data mining. There must be billions if they cannot be removed. But personally I think you just have no clue what you are talking about (actually I know you not have cause I know the Android code). Please prove me wrong by providing one single link to a source file. Only one.
But it becomes better. You would take MS over Android? A closed system where you not even have access to the sourcecode, cannot control, cannot fork, have no control, rights or possibilities at all? Muhaha. What a bad joke.
Edited 2012-07-29 18:19 UTC
ok, a couple of things…
As I said, expecting Me or any normal android user to fork Android is absurd. It might be FLOSS, but i can’t do that, I am not capable in any reasonable amount of time, and the same goes for most of Androids users.
It’s a common cry of the Linux enthusiast, but it is an unreasonable expectation. The vast majority of potential users are not capable of fixing bugs, or changing functionality, or managing an OSS project.
Repeating it does not change that.
Who said Linux wasn’t free. With Linux, I have the choice to disable SELinux, or not install it at all. With Android, the whole thing comes from Google, just like Windows comes from MS. Android is free, but like MS, Google is a publicly traded company, and ultimately beholden to it’s shareholders, not it’s customers. It may not be free forever, and it may be totally integrated with the cloud soon, useless with out Google’s servers behind it.
Is anyone capable of forking it going to be able to afford to build the infrastructure to handle millions of peoples pictures movies, texts, emails, blah blah blah?
I don’t trust MS more than Google, but every time they turn around somebody is crying OMFG!!! ANTITRUST!!!! I just think that as companies, their motivations are different. MS makes it money on Windows and Office. They’ll screw over their partners, bully OEMs, give IE away for free, whatever to sell Windows, and we’ve suffered a bit for it, there is no denying it. Google however, makes it’s money on Ads, and does that through it’s search engine, it’s toolbar, it’s webmail service, it’s browser, Ads are the reason Google exists. The more data it has, the more target its ads can become, the more money it can make.
I use Android, I just got a shiny Galaxy Note. I love it. But that doesn’t mean I want Android on my desktop, because I do different things on my desktop then my phone, none of which I want Google snooping about.
It isn’t just the desktop. For a long time you couldn’t enter bluetooth custom PINs, they wanted an internal in-code database based on device type or id. Network Manager is worse. It managed to remember several dozen APs on my drive to work but took over a minute to find the AP at my desk. And this – no refresh button – is intentional. You ned to turn wireless off then on. Yes, this is their idea of user friendly. The panel was dropped and replaced with nothing though with ridiculous effort you can get back a half-functioning one and some applets. Notifications became either annoyingly intrusive or useless.
They wanted it to be locked down, ugly, and difficult and basically told anyone who wanted to make it easier or fix things to go away. So they did. They promised to make things a bit better in the release 2 years from now but still not really address the problems.
In one sense it is like the iPad/iOS. If you find the jail is comfortable and has everything you want, it works well. Probably for 80%. The moment you want to think different, you can’t use it. At all. Like to play with some serial devices, well maybe you can turn the headset into an acoustic coupler modem, but it is easier to just move to something better. Gnome 3 and much of its progeny are similar – using gconf shouldn’t be necessary, nor installing dozens of packages. I’ve switched to Xfce.
Got the multi-monitor problems fixed meanwhile? With only 20 developers working on the whole GNOME I somehow doubt it.
While I do agree with the author that GNOME is becoming more and more just another Red Hat project (for better or worse) I think it’s important to put his statements in context. Let’s look at some of the other posts he’s put up recently…
“Google is killing free software”
“Why Fedora is awesome: Fedora is awesome, because it not only breaks gdb and strace in the default install, it even advertises it as a feature. I wonder if this is enough as a proof that Fedora security people have no clue about security?”
“Why SELinux is not awesome”
“self-congratulating echo chamber: I won’t be attending GUADEC this year. I don’t feel like I would be productive in the current state of things.”
The author is obviously just writing a series of troll mini-blogs to get people stirred up. People probably shouldn’t take him seriously.
Why not make arguments why he is wrong rather then throwing dirt at him? Please note that this article is not about the person but the arguments he raised and Thom underlines that even rather explicit in this news.
Edited 2012-07-27 22:43 UTC
Despite of using several desktop UI (mainly Windows, Mac Os X and diferents linux GUI’s) the only one that can rival with the best I know (Mac Os Classic) was Gnome 2.x. In fact trying to work whith Gnome 3 I ended working with the text terminal, been the most “anty-CLI” guy since the introduction of the original Macintosh.
Gnome 3 is a nonsense. KDE didn’t count as a desktop be cause only is a bad web page.
I tried repeatedly to like Gnome3 but, I hate it. I’ve used extension after extension but, in the end, I ended up back at Unity, which I hate less (and I find at least usable). Since I’m not a KDE fan either, I am hoping for Linux Mint to save the day with Cinnamon.
Could the Android GUI eventually find it’s way onto a Linux distribution? With a little imagination, it could be adapted for PC mouse/keyboard usage. A quick search on this subject matter doesn’t reveal much.
(Sidenote: It seems a lot people want to run Linux GUIs on Android devices, which is a little odd … To me anyway.)
I’m sure there would be many technical and philosophical hurdles to over-come (see all the issues just getting kernel level changes back into Linux), but it could provide a standard environment for developers to target.
I only think about this from time to time, because of all the fragmentation on the Linux Desktop. Some environments are nice to use (Linux Mint is decent) but Ubuntu lost me with Unity.
If we’re going for the big-button touch look, then give me the real McCoy!
Not with the typical Java hate Android gets.
Yes, this is a fair point. 🙁
With Mono operating under Gnome and the NDK being available for Android as well I wonder why there isn’t a side project *somewhere* for this?
I guess I’ll just stick with Xfce. *shrugs*
Because for Google the NDK is only meant for games, port “legacy” code, or optimizing parts of the code.
Most the Android APIs available to C and C++ code are actually C wrappers around JNI calls back to the Dalvik.
Not exactly. There are a few Qt games AND applications on google play available to all Android devices. You can already write Android apps using other technologies. There is for example a port going on of Gnucash to Android under the Gnome umbrella currently. Google offers choice, fully legal, supported and unlimited choice, to push Android future. The NDK is the door that opens that choice. The reason why it wraps the Android SDK is that the Android SDK provides all the high-level APIs which you may like but do not need to use in your applications.
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!
… and I think that those responsible should be named and shamed for it.
I don’t know anyone who uses Gnome 3. But I do know quite a few people who continue to use Gnome 2 and a few others who have moved to different desktops after the first distributions with Gnome 3 came out. Most people I am talking to are seriously pissed off about Gnome 3 because the changes in the new desktop are not the result of careful research into what’s wanted, what’s needed, what’s desirable in a GNU/Linux desktop but the dictates of a small bunch of self-appointed “designers” who don’t give a flying duck about the users who have to put up with their creations. Unfortunately, in a project of this size, such talentless and arrogant “designers” have armies of enthusiastic young coders at their disposal. On top of all of that comes of course that people are given no choice in the matter. People usually don’t like to be shoved around like that. Most people resent being told to take it or leave it. Only people devoid of critical faculties, conformists and bootlickers welcome any change that’s forced upon them, no matter what.
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.
I sympathize. the application and desktop environment and linux OS paradigm is a mess that locks everyone mediocrity. but it’s their choice, so fine. the problem for us is nobody competent cares to do an OS which filters out the sewage. but you can’t blame them either, because there is no profit in it, and no need for it with windows and mac around.
I feel your pain! I was forced to move from Ubuntu 10.04 (Gnome2) to a different distro – because 10.04 didn’t support all my hardware in my new (high spec) PC. Not to mention (K)Ubuntu 12.04 is buggy as hell (total system freezes constantly – not even the mouse pointer can move). So I tried a few others and settled on OpenSuse 12.1, but it too had its share of problems. KDE4 sucks, Unity sucks, Cinnamon is too early days, Gnome3 sucks, XFCE I don’t like. So what the hell do I do?? Well, get down to the basics! I installed JWM (Joe’s Window Manager). It’s simple, it’s fast, and it doesn’t cause me to fight it every step of the way. The only thing I added to JWM was the jwm-menu add-on to convert the XDG menus into JWM menus (plus my custom / most used menu entries). I’m super happy now. I use whatever apps I liked before (Firefox, gEdit etc) and can actually get work done for a change. These latest DE’s are just bloat, damn slow, and causes the end-user to fight them every step of the way. Long live JWM!!!!
Edited 2012-08-01 10:54 UTC
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.
“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.
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.
There was a similar public setback for KDE recently:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyNzI
(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.
Actually for me, the OS stopped to matter when I switched full time to JVM/CLR based development.
—
Paulo
If you don’t do UI, the OS hasn’t mattered in 10 years (posix, stdc++ etc).
Well that is assuming POSIX and other wrappers are good enough across all OS.
15 years ago when I was writing server software in C, besides POSIX calls, we had lots of #ifdefs for APIs not covered by POSIX.
For those that are not aware, UNIX != POSIX, if you need to support all major vendors across different versions.
OpenVMS and OS/400 are also not that C and C++ friendly, even with their “POSIX” environments.
I also enjoy programming against the bare minimal, lowest-common-denominator set of APIs that aren’t quite perfectly supported across platforms (and no real efforts are being made today to make that happen).
Not even close to. Developers come and go. The fluctuation rate is rather high in FLOSS project. As long as number of developers leaving and joining keeps in balance or even grows everything is fine. Dolphin was started by one guy who left now after years of years. But in the time Dolphin got a bunch of new active developers which continue. Some only joined recently. That is grow not decline.
It is actually a very health signal when the inventor, the initiator of a project leaves and the project continues cause other developers can and do take over.
Edited 2012-07-27 23:01 UTC
What kind of user tests did the GNOME project perform to verify the “improvements” of version 3? Anything? Anything at all?
When I worked at a large company and we redesigned our major app used by 20,000 people internally, we created a focus group (and a control group, too, of course). We built a special room for testing with features to analyze and track user behavior. Testing and verification consumed several months.
The GNOME 3 team just guessed. Microsoft has the power to guess wrong and force its users along (eg: Vista, Metro). GNOME doesn’t. Goodbye, GNOME.
“User tests”?
OSS isn’t about “user tests”, it’s about devs making things that please themselves.
To borrow a phrase, open source software is “of developers, by developers, and FOR developers.” If users just happen to like the results, then that’s merely a pleasant happenstance.
> OSS […] is about devs making things that please themselves.
As a clear example, translations of OSS from English to French are done by people who already know English, they think about other users and do the translations.
Another clear example is that of many companies collaborating http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members to develop Linux, even employing representatives to manage it http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/board-members so that is useful for all.
It shouldn’t even have to be said on this site, but I’m sure you know very well that’s not true of all OSS projects. The very foundation of Ubuntu, the driving force behind its existence, was openness and ease of access for all people everywhere. Even though the project has drifted into a different direction, it still has nothing to do with developers trying to out-leet each other.
There are hundreds of OSS projects out there trying to make a better world for everyone, not just to satisfy a developer’s itch. But even the latter category are almost always done in good faith.
Gnome manages to barely survive because of “forks” like Mate and Cinnamon. That is probably why Mint is ATM the most loved distro.
I have always hated KDE 4 with a passion since 4.0, while I used to find KDE 3 the best destop out there, bare none.
Nowadays I use OS X 90% of the time, but it has its problems too.
It really feels more modern and usable to me than gnome 2 does. I’ve unleashed complete newbies into gnome 3 gui and they didn’t skip a beat. gnome 2 gave the same users some pause and took them a while to figure things out.
Having said that, I understand most users complaints about gnome 3. It takes a different mindset to use, or a ton of extensions. Most people don’t want to completely rethink how they use their desktops. And honestly it isn’t dramatically better after you do. I just like doing things differently from time to time. So I do switch between KDE4 and gnome. when I get a chance I’ll give cinnamon a try too…
This hints that gnome 3 is written for complete newbies?
I use linux since 1997. As a window manager in the beginning I used mainly WindowMaker and XFCE3. Then I started using Garnome, which if I remember it right, was a script to build Gnome 2 from trunk. And in any case, I’ve used Gnome 2 for a very long time.
Since a couple of years, I feel left behind as a faithful linux user. Everything in the linux world lately seems to be targetted at Windows users. Every piece of software seems to be targetted at new inexperienced users. The whole Gnome 3 seems to be targetted at new inexperienced users. Every single piece of software seems to be so dumbed down.
In my eyes, the Gnome developers are targetting a group of people that currently do not, and most likely will not use Gnome. Let me give you a clue: most of those people currently use Windows or OSX and are perfectly happy with those systems. Why would they change? Why would you try to make them change?
The Gnome developers seem to be focussed so much on attracting new users, that they completely ignored the existing user base of experienced linux power users…
Either way.. I switched to XFCE4 in the mean time… which I’m not exactly very happy with, but it works.
Some other people mentioned that some desktop environments have been using methods and idioms that are over 20 years old and that those never changed and that there should be more evolution in the software. Let me tell you this… if those methods and idioms have been in use over the whole world for over 20 years and people are generally happy with those idioms, then it probably means that there must be something good about them.
I think you raise a very valid point. Gnome 3 is targeted towards non-technical users. That’s one of the reason why they have close to zero customization and stuff.
The problem is that once you get out of the Gnome reality distortion field, the people who use GNU/Linux on the desktop are technical people. Linux desktop is mostly very popular amongst engineers and scientists. Those are mostly people who just want a UI that works and don’t care much about all the fancy stuff.
Now, it’s good to try to make an interface that’s more welcoming to new users, but they should do that without alienating their existing userbase.
Maybe it has been designed with non technical users in mind, but it’s perfectly usable by professionals with the right customizations.
Sure, they could have made it much easier to tinker with out-of-the-box by including more options and tools, but I personally find that I need to tinker with any desktop before it behaves like I want it to.
Well, I didn’t exactly mean that it was directed towards newbies. But it doesn’t surprise me that they would have a better time picking it up and accepting it than those that were used to gnome 2.
Its different. I’m not saying that the complaints aren’t valid, because they kind of are. It sucks when someone takes something you have configured perfectly for your usage and messes it all up. Having said that, there is a certain challenge in learning new ways of doing things that is exciting. Obviously those complaining don’t relish that challenge. Which is ironic, because I had thought that challenge was what drove many people to Linux in the first place.
I do believe some of my friends mocked me as a newbie because I used gnome/kde instead of all command line.
I get what you mean, but my sarcastic reply is: it certainly is challenging to use gconf-editor and go search for the option that was removed and that might or might not be available and configurable through gconf-editor…
But seriously, I do get what you mean… however, I think that the feeling is more like that, yes, it is a challenge to configure everything, but if you persist, you will be able to configure everything exactly the way you want it. That “promise” that in the end you are rewarded with an environment exactly the way you want it, is no longer true in my opinion.
That, and the fact that in recent years I have less free time, and don’t wanna invest a lot of time to reconfigure my desktop environment every time someone thinks it needs to be “improved”.
Well.. do not underestimate the power of the commandline. But on the other hand it would be stupid to not also use the power of a graphical shell.
Who *ARE* these people? Your inbred cousins living in the mountains of West Virginia?
The choice for KDE, Gnome2 or Gnome3 or Unity is for me very simple. It is the feeling I get working with it. Here they are:
KDE: Do what you have to do, and f*** off.
Unity: You are stupid. Let me help you.
Gnome2: Hello. How are you doing? Take some coffee while you are here.
I didn’t try Gnome3. One look and I was gone.
I switched to Xubuntu (which uses Xfce as you probably know). It comes close to the Gnome2-experience but not quite.
Gnome 2 never offered coffee. It just was.
It was almost apologetic:
Yeah… I am what I am, what do you want for free? Here, have some ugly ass buttons to click. They’ll do stuff good.
Even though I’ve been using Linux as my main OS since the mid-90’s (the Slackware floppies!), I think I am an average user in this scenario. After the early days, when getting X working at all was a challenge (xf86config was my friend), I settled on Gnome, first with Redhat, then with Ubuntu. I even used Gnome on Suse, even though KDE was their main desktop.
However, both Unity and Gnome3 just drive me nuts. It seems like way too much work to get anything done. If it doesn’t seem that way to you, then YAY and extra puppies for you! Therefore, I have settled into Mint with Cinnamon. It’s just a saner desktop FOR ME.
I also don’t like Metro on Windows 8. Why in the world with all the progress we’ve made would I want to go back to full-screen apps. Not! However, on smaller devices, it’s a different story. On tablets, Windows 8 makes sense. On my Netbook, Unity makes sense. It makes effective use of the limited space. But on my desktop of full laptop, there isn’t going to be any Metro, Unity, etc.
You can call us old, cranky, inflexible, or any other perjorative. That’s OK. But I certainly don’t feel bad about the dwindling numbers in Gnome. You really didn’t want our input on this. So feel free to ignore this one also.
Exactly the way I feel. The Gnome developers completely ignored their Gnome 2 user base, for the development of Gnome 3.
These people also made the stupid decision to have network-manager store all network information in a directory that needs root access by default. So if you are making a system for people that do not (and should never) have root/sudo access then they cannot even connect to wireless.
Why the hell would they require admin rights just to connect to an open access point shows a level of incompetence that betrays system security and any level of understanding of how computers are used.
Uh, what are you talking about? Connecting to wireless or any other network using network-manager does not require root and it never has.
What does it say of your competence that you’re totally wrong?
Soulbender said:
Uh, what are you talking about? Connecting to wireless or any other network using network-manager does not require root and it never has.
Obviously you just type your password into any box that asks for it. Try creating a new account without sudo rights and see how far you get.
Here are a few discussions about this issue so you can read the even Linus has hit this ‘feature’ when setting up his daughters laptop.â€I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone and adding a new wireless network was moronic and wrong.â€
https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5
And from the Suse forum:
“Previously, network definitions were kept in your local user files. Now they are being kept centrally in a root owned directory. That change is reasonable. But requiring the root password to setup a connection is just a bad idea.
You are at a coffee shop. You want to connect to their wireless. So you have to give the root password at a place where everything you do is being videotaped. Not good.â€
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-…
And the Ubuntu forum posts about it:
“In Ubuntu 11.10, I’ve created a standard (non admin) user account. That user is unable to connect to a wireless network via wireless manager without an administrator authenticating.
Seems like it’s trying to add the connection for all users.
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1873477.html
Edited 2012-07-28 01:50 UTC
You shouldn’t be able to create delete accounts without admin privileges – do you think you should? I’m with Soulbender on this one.
The need to to have admin privileges to join a wireless network was an Opensuse problem (KDE is the default desktop) I guess related to YAST, not a Gnome 3 problem.
Obviously if you are going to change network settings across multiple users (such as changing the default wireless) you need admin privilege so obviously a non-admin account is not going to be able to do it and rightly so.
You seem to be talking nonsense or perhaps you like the way Windows 9x works?
Edited 2012-07-28 09:12 UTC
On my Windows 7 laptop, even a user on the Guest account can connect to a wireless network without needing my password or the Admin password; the user would only need to know the router’s wireless passphrase or WPS key. On my old Mac mini it was the same way; connecting to a wireless network shouldn’t involve local security at all. That’s what WiFi encryption and passphrases are there for.
Or to put it another way, would you want to have to enter your root password every time you plugged in an Ethernet cable?
And that’s exactly how network-manager works. It’s not a network-manager or GNOME problem is SuSE decides differently or Ubuntu (in one version) has an unfortunate default.
I regularly connect to wireless networks, mobile broadband and wired networks and I have never been asked for admin rights when connecting using network-manager. Ever.
I think some people in this thread are mistaking the local key-store password request with a gksu elevation. They are not the same thing.
I’m with the original poster. It’s not like this *now*, but I remember having to enter my password just to change the time zone on Ubuntu (KDE in fact, but I guess it has less to do with DEs as with the system itself). Or to attach a second display.
And this relates to Network-Manager exactly how? Changing the system timezone does (or did) indeed require root but it’s not like it’s something you do a lot.
NM has never required root password.
It is the same with Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora or any Desktop Linux I’ve used apart from Opensuse – this is not a Gnome issue, you only need to elevate if you are changing other users accounts and this is as it should be.
No I dont because I never get asked for a root password when connecting to wireless networks.
I have accounts without admin rights that has no problem connecting. They’re never asked for a password or root credentials. This has been the case since I started using Ubuntu many years ago.
That’s a problem specific to SuSE, not GNOME or network-manager.
Yes to add the connection for ALL users you obviously need admin rights. The solution is simple, uncheck the proper check box. The fact that the default in Ubuntu 11.10 was “wrong” has nothing to do with network-manager or Gnome. Bugs happen.
Network-manager does not need root privs to connect to wireless networks or any other networks.
Open Source is about freedom of choice, and i can’t understand why OSNews publishes such flame-like very personal opinion of one individual.
Gnome 3 is free software, you dont pay for it.
Why do you expect it to be as you want it?
Its exactly like people who put effort in making it want it to be.
You dont like it? Use KDE,LDE,XFCE, … and stop whining about Gnome 3 dont be what you expect.
Or get involved in making Gnome 3 (or 4) like you want it by taking part in the process.
Edited 2012-07-27 20:44 UTC
Forget the first paragraph. Benjamin should know what he is talking of.
Accepting criticism and weighing the validity of such is how mature people can grow and refine themselves, and similarly a software project can grow and be refined if the developers are willing to listen. In fact, the whole process of growing up from a child to an adult involves receiving criticism and adjusting yourself based on that — be the criticism from your fellow peers or from your parents — and one’s maturity is quite well reflected in how one handles the criticism one receives. Then, complaining about someone providing criticism is counter-productive if you’re not actually even trying to debunk said claims or to provide reasoning for your decisions.
Also, something being F/OSS does not mean it should be inherently safe from negative reviews or remarks, that would just be childish. Not to mention it’d make this “our camp is better than your camp!” – mentality even more pronounced. If people using F/OSS software are allowed to make negative commentary about non-F/OSS software then in all fairness both F/OSS and non-F/OSS people should be allowed to make such commentary back.
I want the desktop to access folders and files. To configure my printer. To configure my wifi. And that’s about it. The rest of the time the desktop should simply get out of the way.
Wrong reactions from a desktop:
– User: Load yourself.
– Desktop: Give me 800 MB of RAM.
– User: Open this folder.
– Desktop: Let me make a cute animation before, that will eat your battery and make you wait a little bit more.
– User: Delete this file.
– Desktop: Your current virtual user is not the same as the one that owns this file, and I don’t know whether you know her password, and I won’t ask you for it either. Instead I’ll let you know that “You don’t have permission to delete this file”.
– User: (Decides to type a shortcut but in the process she hesitates, so she) presses the “Alt” key without actually pressing a second key.
– Desktop: Let me take the focus of your app and put it on a unwanted box that, by the way, won’t give you access to bookmarks nor files but to the configuration of your screensaver and other utterly irrelevant things.
Now I use LXDE. The best desktop I’ve used is GNOME 2.32. I think it would be a good idea to release GNOME 2.34 being basically the GNOME 2.32 experience with the GNOME 3 technology.
Edited 2012-07-27 21:30 UTC
If you don’t like how much RAM a modern DE uses then you should probably use a non-modern one. There are perfectly valid, technical reasons for using RAM, like e.g. supporting languages and scripts not based on our Roman left-to-right connotation, supporting multiple kinds of input devices and so on.
Animations are inherently useful as they can steer one’s attention to a point of interest, they may provide extra insight into what is happening, and often without an animation you wouldn’t even know if the computer is doing what you directed it to do.
I agree only partially: the system should ask for the credentials of the owner file/folder so that you can perform tasks on it, but that’s all the system should do. It should not let you access stuff that doesn’t belong to you and it should make the fact of it not belonging to you so bleeding obvious that even Average Joe would understand it.
On top of that, E17 can do some amazing things including 60fps animations and compositing with very little RAM and CPU usage, and consequently very little impact on the battery compared to static environments. I’ve put E17 on a 400MHz thin client with 128MB RAM and only the barest of 2D acceleration, and it performed flawlessly.
Sorry, but I must strongly disagree.
I ran Fedora 17 w/ KDE 4.9rc on a low-end Asus 1201N w/ 2GB RAM, and my idle memory usage (DE only) is under 300MB. (And Fedora is not really “slim”).
Granted, Firefox / Chrome increase the memory usage dramatically when you start opening multiple tabs, but all in all, KDE 4.9 uses ~70-100MB more than XFCE 4.10.
– Gilboa
Or at least I don’t dislike it as much as I thought I would. Actually I’m doing something that I never thought I would do: using Gnome Shell at work
I guess I just got used to it, although there are still some things I hate.
As someone else said on a previous post the problem is not Gnome Shell, is it’s awesome potential coupled with it’s null OOTB customizability and the scarce documentation.
I’m sure you could do really cool things with javascript and css were it not because the devs decided that their vision of how the desktop should be was so perfect that releasing an immutable implementation that looked and worked exactly the same on everyone’s desktop was a good idea.
Gnome3 has technically become a lot like something I hate with passion: the Windows desktop. A place where every functional tweak is a hack.
At least, unlike Windows, even though Overview gets in your way you still have a somewhat decent window management (eg. alt+drag to move and resize, scroll on non focused windows… the usual stuff).
I know I’ll eventually move to something different (maybe E17 again) but it’s a shame because Gnome3 has the potential to be a pretty good desktop, and not the halfassed kinda pretty somewhat usable and sometimes annoying thing that it’s now.
Everybody mention XFCE as an alternative. I just want to mention that Razor Qt is a good alternative too.
I’m currently settled on Lubuntu, which is based on LXDE. The only other desktop which might lure me away from it is Enlightenment, which is at its best on Bodhi Linux. Both LXDE and Enlightenment are lean and fast, which suits me since I don’t need a lot of eye-candy bloat to slow down performance.
I could happily live without Gnome or KDE. However, the thing that concerns me is the libraries. Gnome is based on GTK, and KDE is based on QT. A whole lot of applications rely on those libraries, so it’s important that they be maintained. I do worry that if developers abandon Gnome, nobody will be updating the libraries, and application development may suffer.
We probably don’t need two sets of libraries on Linux. Either GTK or QT, either will do, but I have no idea which one is better or more likely to spur developer interest.
Edited 2012-07-27 23:12 UTC
There have been a lot of good points made here so I won’t be long. Maybe if gnome shell was simple to modify as gnome 2 we wouldn’t be at this point at all?
Personally gnome3 is my favorite de but everyone seems to value the customisation way more than i do.
gnome is like most things in the desktop linux world: made by strange people to suit their strange fantasies. of course this is because everyone else is happy puttering along with windows or mac. I’m not hating on strange people.
but at best this stuff has no place among normal people. at worst it has no place among nerds either. it is clear to most now that gnome went a bridge too far with gnome3, and strangely enough ubuntu did too when they abandoned gnome.
we’ll see who wins. gnome3, unity, and metro, or cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and classic shell. I don’t have the inside track, but the smart money always bets on what worked in the past. no strange fantasies.
The sad part about this whole fiasco is rather than look at the two desktops of reasonable quality in the UNIX world: CDE and IRIX Interactive Desktop what they decided to do was copy either Windows and/or Mac OS X. IMHO it would be a lot more fruitful had they embraced IRIX Interactive Desktop and then built upon it – it had the basic foundations that were a little dated but those could have easily been addressed as new functionality was added whilst keeping in the same spirit as the original design.
Im glad i changed to awesomewm a long time ago, long before gnome3.
Gnome3 is excellent at what it does I guess, and gnome2 too.. If one like overlapping windows… but one should be able to choose from both easily on all distros.
Gnome3 has loads of potential for TVs, smart phones, tablets etc, but shouldnt be pushed on desktop users.
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.
No they shouldn’t. This is the reason the used-to-be No. 1 Linux desktop is in a downward spiral.
If anyone read a UI design book here then he\she knows that one of the basic principles of UI design is familiarity. They should have only changed to an entirely new concept if it brings obvious advantages and the whole new overall experience is better despite that new concept (IMHO the ribbon in the MS Office is good example of that).
Instead they made the basic tasks of the DE, e.g. launching apps and switching between them, more difficult.
Obviously implementing a totally new UI concept requires a lot of UX tests which is something the OSS world doesn’t excel.
One more thing. A desktop UI is not there to chase away your boredom as the article seems to suggest. It’s there to make your everyday tasks as easy as possible. And those old desktops with their 20 year old principles are good enough for that.
Just because something is new that doesn’t mean it’s better than the old one, or the old things shouldn’t be redesigned just because they’re old.
To tell you one example I happily use the old pear shaped light bubbles which are almost the same as Thomas Edison designed them. They do their job and I don’t need more.
It’s not only the gnome project. KDE has the same problem too. The problem is 3-fold:
1) The most vocal users in the Linux community are poison to Linux. They think they are helping, but they aren’t. They are destroying Linux. Developers cannot make major changes without worrying users will freak out, and they blow tiny stuff out of proportion with glitzy phrases like “DLL hell” or “popup hell”.
If a change to an old Linux standard is proposed, they freak out, because they refuse to accept that the standard had a different purpose at the time (like the filesystem hierarchy, which mainly made sense in 1MB HDD drive days). And yes, they are happy to try to destroy the project without any consideration.
Finally, for them, its always “CLI is uber powerful” or “oh,you can do it in bash, its really efficient”. CLI isn’t THAT efficient, and I’ve seen a Linux guru trash their home directory once with “rm -rf . /DIR”. If it can be done by CLI, apparently, any GUI addition is “bloat”.
2) I’ve noticed that on platforms like iOS or Android, users happily donate for the parts of a project which has been done. On Linux however, users only donate if they feel that the money will be used well in the future. Since the future is always uncertain, users rarely donate. I make more money in a week than KDE or Gnome make in some months..
3) Because there are barely any donations , projects can afford very few full time developers, and can’t reward developers in any way. Those who love programming, probably have a programming job and often are too tired to go home to code. Those who are hobbyist, don’t have much time available. I’m not saying sell out, but, with more donations, a lot more could be accomplished, and developers could stop working for proprietary companies.
To offset the row of bashing, I tought I’d leave a small account of my experiences with GNOME-Shell.
I have been using GNOME-Shell (on Ubuntu 12.04) for several months now, privately and at work. Some colleagues at work have been using it for a few months as well, and so far there hasn’t been any serious critizism.
The only extensions I installed was the user theme extension and the contacts extension. And I installed the tweak tool. Most of my colleagues have done the same, some didn’t mind the default theme and didn’t install the user theme extension. I never really used panel applets that much in GNOME 2, so I’m not upset about the “non-configurability” of the top bar.
My first few impressions of GNOME-Shell were less than stellar, I couldn’t run it on my desktop and laptop due to kernel/driver issues. At the time there were either missing features in the Intel graphics driver or horrible power management to choose from. These problems were totally unrelated to GNOME-Shell, and were eventually fixed in the kernel/driver. After that, I used GNOME-Shell full time.
GNOME 2 started with putting rarely used, “expert” configuration options into gconf without providing a UI for them. So I wasn’t surprised when GNOME-Shell continued this, and the tweak tool unearths those most useful to me. There were some issues with configuring keyboard shortcuts and a few other window management behaviors, these seem to be caused by Ubuntu however (editing parts of GNOME 3 to use gconf instead of gsettings/dbus). A bit of googleing resolved these issues, and while I found this really annoying, I’m not dooming the whole project out of my own experience.
Because over the last months I have not only become acustomed to the search functionality, I have come to rely on it. I hardly ever use my mouse, since most of the day I’m either writing code, documentation or emails. Starting and switching to some other application is incredible, I can start or switch to any application using the Win-key and typing at most three letters; using the search is so fast, I don’t even use the favorites dock.
The new Alt-Tab behavior took some time getting used to, but now I find it really helpful when I try to find the one Skype window, or the one Terminal window I’m looking for. But I’m actually using the overview even more often than Alt-Tab. Another thing I had to get used to, but now find much more useful, is the automatic workspace management.
I’m also fond of the animations, they’re really smooth, non-distractive. I had some lockups here and there, there used to be the occasional load spike were the GNOME-Shell process was using 100% CPU. However, this seems to have been fixed in the recent updates. I could never find any apparent reason for this, but I’m glad it’s gone. GNOME-Shell runs very smooth and stable all through my work day and it’s only when I’m trying out some extensions, that I start seeing some instability.
So, my experience is overall positive. It doesn’t distract me and all important window/application/workspace management is only a few key strokes (or mouse throws/clicks) away. Either GNOME-Shell really fits my workflow, or its workflow really works well for me. Most problems I had were unrelated to GNOME-Shell or fixed in the next releases. I’m glad the project tried something new and broke with it’s previous conservative, iterative approach.
> To offset the row of bashing …
… and to those who mechanically denounce any criticism of their favorite desktop environment as “bashing”, make your own point, if you have any, but stop attacking the critics. Criticism based on a sober assessment is not “bashing”.
From a design point of view, the whole GNOME Shell concept is flawed.
If one created an extension that would provide a 3 top level menu with a bottom taskbar just like GNOME 2 was, under GNOME Shell, it would help to keep the people interested. There are some extensions that can mimick menus and so on, but they\’re not the same as GNOME 2. I am talking about a full clone of the GNOME 2 top level menus: Applications – Places – System. Of course we would also want to have all the window title buttons back and our window list at the bottom.
I mean, all of those things can be implemented as default on the back of GNOME 3 technologies. Insisting that current GNOME 3 design will succeed over time is just simply silly. We don\’t need a fallback hack mode – all we need is a well written extension. GNOME 3 though, looks as if someone really wanted to ruin the whole project.
I just can be hovering the mouse 1000 times a day onto a screen corner. [redacted]
Linux is losing more market share and I\’m considering moving back to Windows 7. Because I have more important work to do than playing the tablet on my desktop.
That is what Cinnamon in Linux Mint is all about.
Only problem with that is you need to rewrite the Gnome Shell extensions…ugh!
I think it’s wiser to fork and mod XFCE because this route should be shorter. XFCE is faster than GNOME 2 and much faster than GNOME 3. I don’t think it’s that difficult to get XFCE on par with GNOME 2 as in look & feel and also replacing some default applications.
Cinnamon is just like a 10 hour emergency surgery that will lead the patient to be unable to have full recovery. Projects like MATE certainly need Linus Torvalds himself to ‘take on’ the lead so that it could mean something to everyone in Linux ecosystem.
Unity and GNOME Shell were a major punch on the face and we all went to the ground. We’re getting up, trying to recover, and a bit dizzy. The purpose of so many mistakes surrounding the DE communities are to reevaluate our thinking.
For the time being, it will be CentOS and favourite applications compiled on /opt
I was a die-hard KDE fan and always thought Gnome sub-par. However, I learned to accept Gnome after openSUSE started pushing KDE 4, and a subsequent switch to Ubuntu. Now that the purists have spent their time telling us how we should work, we moved on and made both. KDE and Gnome irrelevant. I’m currently typing this on one of my two Android tablets, which have taken over as my main computers at home. I still have a Wintendo computer running along with a paleontology my DMZ running Debian. The Debian system is used mostly to proxy and running things like Android development. It is running with lightweight OpenBox.
Good bye Gnome, I still fail to understand why it was needed to compete with KDE just over the Qt license.
Gnome 3 (still) has all technical and organizational means to become a great desktop environment. I like their use of extensions and high level languages. I even like the integrated design, even though it aggravates the project problems. It is the politics and attitude that made Gnome3 fail. Sorry, guys, you cannot reasonably expect that after pissing off 80% of your users, Gnome will continue to keep its position. Others (Xfce) haven’t even thought of making such mistakes, or (Mate, Cinnamon) are trying to reverse yours.
Honestly, admit the mistake, rethink your politics and design it produced. Look at what others (Cinnamon, Xfce, Kde, Unity, Gnome3 fallback) have done meanwhile, and make the desktop people (not you) want. It isn’t a lost case yet and it isn’t hard at all (just look at resources others have).
Why is it important? Because in a short period between Gnome 2 maturing and dying, Linux was making strides in users’ adoption. Having a “standard” and “good enough” DE matters. I may be more happy with Xfce than with Gnome 2 or 3, but ultimately we all use the same platform, and we need users flocking in, not out. Unity may or may not be able to replace Gnome in that role but it also has problems and it shouldn’t be difficult for Gnome to recover its former position.
Things I consider key antifeatures of Gnome 3:
– modal behavior – it is bad for several reasons: it slows down the user, adds complexity, hides important information from the user (windows, workspaces, main menu, launchers). What’s worse, Gnome 3 already has a panel, why don’t you use it?
– lack of configurability – more is always better. Not everything has to be shown in the setting dialogs but restricting options is idiotic. Instead options you get forks.
– lack of features – users should decide what they need. Sure, there is a lot of noise, so feel free to come up with some scoring+karma mechanism. But never decide what goes in (and especially out) arbitrarily.
why to use gnome anyway. Throughout the history i tried them almost all wm-s and these dreamy castles never convinced me i really need them. Fool’s gold i’d call it.
blackbox, sawfish, windowmaker should suffice for anybody who’s not completely lame.
.* bless them!
What’s all these dreamy castles like mice and color monitors?
A black & white text monitor and punch cards should suffice for anybody who’s not completely lame.
yea right, reductio ad absurdum. and the rest can just switch to m$ word as default editor.
let’s heat the planet, bloat lovers
Every now and then comes up a guy saying ‘just drop that graphical crap’, and be happy with ‘owm, iwm or zwm’. I find those posts kind of ridiculous and off-topic. Graphical interfaces have dominated personal computing & the desktop. Telling people that ‘owm, iwm or zwm’ would be better for them is the same as saying earth is a squared block in the old days. You can’t tell you what’s best for people and console although very helpful is not the cup of tea for the great majority computer users.
Edited 2012-07-31 16:01 UTC
As a happy Unity user I just don’t care about Gnome vs. KDE wars anymore. Sure it still has room for improvements, but for most of the time it just works and is perfectly stable in 12.04. It’s quite beautiful, too.
Great move from Canonical.
I was a die-hard KDE fan and always thought Gnome sub-par. However, I learned to accept Gnome after openSUSE started pushing KDE 4, and a subsequent switch to Ubuntu. Now that the purists have spent their time telling us how we should work, we moved on and made both. KDE and Gnome irrelevant. I’m currently typing this on one of my two Android tablets, which have taken over as my main computers at home. I still have a Wintendo computer running along with a paleontology my DMZ running Debian. The Debian system is used mostly to proxy and running things like Android development. It is running with lightweight OpenBox.
Good bye Gnome, I still fail to understand why it was needed to compete with KDE just over the Qt license.