The future of GNOME – an interesting subject. GNOME 3 has been out and about for a while, and it hasn’t exactly been a smashing success. One of the efforts to take GNOME to the next level is what the team refers to as GNOME OS – but in reality, it’s a set of improvements to GNOME that are just as interesting to GNOME-the-desktop-environment.
For instance, one of the most important things the GNOME team will work on is application development and distribution. The team believes that the GNOME APIs are too much of a shifting target, and that application distribution is difficult and fragmented. On top of that, there’s really no way for developers to maintain a brand or earn money.
If you already know where this is going, you’re not the only one. First, maintain compatibility for years. A no-brainer. Second, sandboxed applications. Red flags going up for some I’m sure, but GNOME is open source, so I wouldn’t worry. Third, easier packaging and, not mentioned but I’m sure included, deployment (I smell an application store). This new application framework will be available outside of GNOME OS for regular distributions as well.
They also want to modernise the development tools and aim to include an application development SDK with GNOME OS. The GNOME human interface guidelines will also be updated, which surprised me because I assumed the radically different GNOME 3 already had its own HIG.
This isn’t everything they’re working on, but it does offer a glimpse of what GNOME is working towards. They clearly want to become a full-fledged platform, more on par with Android or iOS than GNOME 2 or KDE (KDE might actually be going in a similar direction, I don’t know). Overall, I think this is a good idea, because a graphical user interface and its applications – what GNOME essentially is to most users – needs deep system integration to work as good as possible.
What’s also clear is that the GNOME guys aren’t backing down with this whole GNOME 3 thing. Criticism or no, they’re sticking to their guns, and I applaud that. These people have a vision, and while I might not always agree with what they’ve done to my beloved GNOME 2, they are at least trying to move ahead (like KDE has done and is doing with KDE4).
I just installed XFCE 4.8 and razor-qt 0.4.1 to play around in last night.
I really enjoying these smaller DE’s but still miss the completeness that gnome offers. It feels safer knowing that GNOME has the complete application/applet/background processes under control.
What surprised me was that in spite of me not liking KDE, razor-qt is awesome! It’s a young project but it’s simple and to the point, any QT fans should check it out.
I will probably always default to GNOME because I’ve never really had any problems with it but if there’s one thing GNOME needs, it’s that GNOME OS / KDE SC direction.
Too many arbitrary changes occur out of nowhere for no real reason other than personal preference.
Edited 2012-08-08 23:30 UTC
KDE is awesome, I am running it on an X120e with no problems. Classic taskbar/menu setup, but also has the Gnome-shell style expose feature when you throw the mouse to the top left corner of the screen.
There already was a Gnome OS, it was the standard desktop on UNIX-like systems for almost a decade. It was designed based on millions of dollars of UI research paid for by Sun Microsystems and Ximian, used in enterprise operating systems like RHEL and Solaris, and desktop systems like Ubuntu. It was replaced by a toy shell.
I hope Canonical or RedHat or somebody big buys Qt and standardizes on a modified KDE. KDE is almost there, but it needs polish. It lacks consistency and sane default settings, kind of like what Gnome was before Ximian came along. I can’t see Gnome-shell replacing the old Gnome 2.x in enterprise environments, and it doesn’t seem that the developers even want that to happen.
What’s wrong with KDE at the moment? Most of the defaults seem alright to me but you weren’t clear on which settings specifically you don’t like so I might be missing your point
Most of the changes are fine-tuning, and fall into two categories: the perception of speed (disabling blur by default, changing the delay focus policy to 50ms, making popups and animations faster), and UI refinement (getting rid of huge areas of padding/dead space in Dolphin and KOffice, applying the same font type and rendering to GTK+ apps by default, get rid of the cashew, an updated icon theme, popup notifications that don’t steal focus and doesn’t get in the way of suspend/resume). I use KDE and have for years, so I know how to make it look nice and fast, but I can also understand how a new user will become frustrated at the slow, confusing defaults. Whatever KDE5 ends up being, it should be more of a cleaning up of the solid base that KDE4 has become.
I completely agree with what you are saying.
Unfortunately, this is not going to happen. The KDE developers have made it clear that certain decisions are there way, or the highway.
Example: The absolute insistence of making the “cashew” impossible to hide or remove shows very clearly that they are completely out of touch with what their own users want. It’s their way of saying “We know better, accept it or p### off”.
For this very reason, I choose not to use KDE anymore.
The sad irony is, KDE is the closest thing the open source world has to a great desktop. Year after year, they continue to shoot themselves in both feet.
With the help of an actual designer, and a complete willingness from the developers to fix the problems that have been raised for years now, KDE could be great again.
Sadly, we all know, this is never going to happen, too many egos will be hurt in the process.
Impossible? In this moment I don’t see the cashew in my desktop. What have I done?
1) make sure that the widgets are unlocked.
2) move the “corner cashew” until is “under” the main panel.
3) lock the widgets.
At one point there was an official plasma widget that just hid the cashew. I never tried it. The cashew is my friend, it watches over my work and instills it with nutty goodness whilst absorbing any irritating toxic oils.
There’s no need of it 🙂
http://www.osnews.com/thread?530570
When posting my earlier comment I was honestly expecting to strongly disagree with you, but instead finding myself in 100% agreeance.
Like yourself, the 1st thing I do when I install KDE is fine tune the settings and, up until now, never really noticed nor thought about it.
Very nicely put mate
(you’ll have to settle for an imaginary +rep though as I’ve already posted)
You mean “Qt”.
Qt == Qt
QT == QuickTime
You might also check out LXDE, similar to razor-qt and at the same time much more mature (razor-qt basically seems like a “hey, let’s do something like LXDE but on Qt” kind of thing); enough to have its own (L)Ubuntu.
“These people have a vision”
I don’t know, I think they are as blind as a bat! They can’t fix the mess called Gnome 3, and now they want to venture into a whole “Gnome OS”. Can’t they see what a mess they made, and how just about nobody likes Gnome 3.
Anyway, the whole Linux “desktop environment” is in shambles at the moment. All these DE’s are forcing users to go back to the basics – simple lightweight Window Managers. JWM you rock!! Thanks KDE4, Gnome3 and Unity for making me see the light. I don’t want to fight my “desktop environment”, I simply want to run a few damn applications, and get on with my work.
I’m sorry, but I like GNOME 3, I love it,so speak for your self.
Likewise. We get that some people don’t like it, but there are also those of us very happy with Shell.
Indeed. I’m quite happy with where Gnome-shell is at the moment compared to it’s predecessors at similar points in their respective lifecycles. The handful of niggles that do still bug me are easy enough to fix with extensions or a little custom scripting.
What I’m less amused with is the preoccupation some devs in Gnome and the other prominent projects have with building tablet UIs at the expense of desktop. Yeah, yeah, the bobbleheaded pundits have been blathering on about the post PC era and moving to tablets forever but really I wish they’d sit down, shut up, and focus on *this* reality until the pipe dreams come to pass.
Edited 2012-08-09 03:02 UTC
Alas, he’s not speaking for himself – hence the recent Gnome issues. It’s also not stopping distributions dropping Gnome altogether or at least as a default.
So…..speak for yourself.
After turning in the wrong direction, continuing ‘ahead’, much less accelerating will only get you farther from the goal.
Someone needs to fork gnome2, or perhaps just work with xfce.
It’s been done, it’s called MATE, and to be honest, it’s a joke. If you don’t like the Gnome 3 UI, the answer isn’t to fork Gnome 2 – it’s to fork Gnome 3 to restore the old UI.
Remember, Gnome 3 isn’t just a UI change – it’s also a huge cleanup of the codebase, throwing away all the bad API decisions that they’d been forced to live with for years. If you fork Gnome 2, you’ve got to adopt all of the code they’re not maintaining any more. Bad idea.
They’ve already forked GNOME 3, FYI, and it’s called Cinnamon. MUCH more usable than anything coming out of GNOME these days.
http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/
Cinnamon is not a fork of GNOME but of Gnome Shell.
Perhaps it’s a joke, but it provides a much, much more usable interface than Gnome 3. Especially on low-end hardware.
What’s “low end” these days? I recently installed Arch Linux with Gnome3 on an Athlon system from 2005, and it ran pretty damn well. The user interface really isn’t that bad either.
Any netbook, for starters. Or anything at all with a 5400 RPM hard drive.
For the record, I started a project at work on an OLD Pentium 2 with 256MB of RAM and a Geforce 5500 AGP card.
Debian Squeeze or the Wheezy alpha Netinst wouldn’t work, so I had to install the base Lenny, upgrade to squeeze, then upgrade to Wheezy. Then I did mange to get Gnome-shell to launch.
While it did run (even with the full on shell, not the fall back) I could not get the nVidia driver to load. That version SHOULD work with the newer version of X.org in Wheezy (1.13 I think) but it gave a segmentation fault, and I haven’t tried since. With the Nouveau driver, the fonts were partially corrupted. It was like it was trying to do font AA, but failed with Ss and Os.
I may start a blog about this…:D
Pentium 2, 256 MiB RAM, Geforce 5500?? That’s some frankenconfig…
(and I’m guessing the VRAM in that GFX card is as much as half of system RAM? Hm, IIRC there were some methods to use a part of large VRAM as general-purpose RAM… yeah, much slower than normal RAM, via AGP – but much faster than swap)
I mean, I have a Pentium 2 around here, 384 MiB RAM – but with Matrox G200 8 MiB.
Maybe you should actually read the article.
Funny, that’s why I like Unity. It works and gets out of the way.
I would agree with your last point about unity except I keep having really irritating performance issues, occasional slowdowns and crashes.
This on both nvidia and ati with both proprietary and foss drivers.
Really sucks.
Also multi-monitor support pretty much sucks and it had just gotten decent with gnome2.
I have an nvidia card using the foss drivers and I’ve never had such problems but YMMV.
I don’t know what you dislike about the multi-monitor support, I find it good.
Your hardware must be very special or your installation is broken. I’ve been using unity on multiple computers without issue for quite a while.
I have a one month old high spec machine based on Ivy Bridge. I tried everything, and K/Ubuntu 12.01 simply kept freezing at random times. It was a system wide freeze, even the mouse cursor didn’t move. I google’ed around, and I was not the only one experiencing this with 12.01.
Have you run burn in and RAM tests on your new machine?
It may just be me, but the last two desktop machines I built for myself had RAM problems. The last one was pretty sneaky because it was able to complete a full Windows installation without an error. It was some problem with triple-channel configuration because each stick tested perfectly fine by itself.
You might also have a heat problem. Perhaps the CPU, the video card or maybe some other motherboard chip.
Speaking of video cards, you can end up getting a bad one. It does happen sometimes that a card may have a defective processor, bad RAM or a badly installed heatsink. Or if it’s a gaming card, it may be overclocked beyond what it can really handle.
Exactly what happened to me! I had this issue with K/Ubuntu 12.04, so it must be something they did at kernel level or something.
You are right again about the multi-monitor issue too. Gnome 2 started to work really well.
They’re insane if they’re going to believe this will work out. They should fix Gnome 3 first and get it on a stage where it is actually usable. And only after that they should run an experiment like this.
As someone who uses GNOME Shell daily for work, I can tell you is not broken to me.
There is nothing to be fixed. Just improved. KDE4.9 (Desktop) and Gnome 3.4 (Notebook) user here.
The effort to become a nice developer platform is really welcome.
Edited 2012-08-09 00:04 UTC
They’re losing developers, maybe making it easier for people who’s ideas are more inline with and excited about the project is just what they need. Just because a lot of us want better multi-monitor support doesn’t mean it’s easy to fit into the current design specification without destroying or diluting it. I think this is just the right move to be making at this point. Attract new developers, and properly examine the framework in order to make calculated expansions into more diverse usage scenarios.
Hopefully dconf will get some serious attention with the new HIG, and instead of dropping features that a lot of people rely on they’ll most often just provide a toggle for advanced users. And would networked deployment/synchronization of dconf settings be too much to ask?
Unfortunately, just because they’re updating the HIG doesn’t mean they’ll be any more open to changes. Here’s hoping they open their minds a little bit, and also fix some of the stupid crap that keeps me on CentOS for the time being. Inconsistent MOD4 keybindings, anyone?
Because they reject any change that does not fit into their little vision. So basically people see that there is no point in joining such a closed group.
Some of the bug reports just make me cry:
Somebody reports a bug (an existing feature was being removed/made crazy), fairly detailed and something that should have been addressed. Instead he gets told he is being abusive and shouted down (probably so they wouldn’t have to rationalise their decisions).
It seems to me that they really don’t want contributors to their project.
This:
Isn’t going to happen until they fix their attitude…
Edited 2012-08-09 20:15 UTC
…But I wonder where it will take them?
Meanwhile, Debian has just moved to XFCE for their default desktop:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE1NTk
Edited 2012-08-09 02:59 UTC
For size constraints (size on 1st install CD).
That’s just the excuse they are using to avoid a huge political fight among the Debian devs.
Firstly, Debian has an Install CD1 (with optional 73 extra ones)” or install DVD1 (with 11) or Blu-ray.
But I don’t know anyone who installs it that way. Most people use the Netinst. In which case, I don’t know if they changed that or not. It looks like the particular patch for changing ‘tasksel’ package to install XFCE by default has not been integrated into either the Wheezy or Sid package.
So (at least for now) the default for the Net install is still Gnome-shell. This doesn’t even matter anyhow, since you can install whichever you wish by simply doing ‘desktop=xxx’ when you launch the installer from the netinst.
Edited 2012-08-10 22:32 UTC
Maybe they shouldn’t call it “GNOME OS” since it seems people have a problem comprehending that this isn’t NOT about creating a GNOME operating system.
Edited 2012-08-09 04:04 UTC
Trust me, that’s exactly what they’re trying to do – while claiming that’s not what they’re doing.
This doesn’t really seem like a case of “people have a problem comprehending” – more like the fault of GNOME for choosing such stupid description (them one-upping KDE 4.0 mess?)
To really fix gnome they should also focus hard on making gnome devices like laptops.
Actually the only smart thing to do is for everyone to focus on building a gnome car!! Yes with gnome integrated deeply. Yeah.
Don’t bother fixing the 20 deal breaker bad UX decisions they’ve made because that certainly has nothing to do with gnome’s crashing user base.
P.S. – Please don’t reply with “well I like it”. Good for you, really, good for you. I’m expressing my distaste and I know I don’t talk for everyone but acknowledge the fact that gnome has in fact seen a mass exodus. So you might like it, but it is clear many (probably most) people do not like it at all.
Honestly for me the biggest deal breaker is their handling of multiple desktops and monitors. I’d venture to guess that most people who like it, simply don’t use more than 1, maybe 2 desktops because the tablet focused desktop handling is just plain unusable if you regularly have many windows open and you want to keep them organized.
Edited 2012-08-09 05:31 UTC
In what sense is Gnome 3 “moving ahead”? Moving backwards or moving sideways i can understand, but ahead? How is taking functionality out and making the software less useful moving ahead? Or is the assumption that people are getting more and more stupid and need their software to be dumbed down to suit? Gnome 3 is the “sesame street” version of a Gnome. Good for kids, but what do adults do with it?
If you like GNOME, good for you. I was never comfortable with a desktop and apps that had fat widgets on all the themes I liked and forced UI behaviours I didn’t want on me in the name of simple configuration dialogs.
That’s the beauty of an open platform. You can use GNOME, while I run LXDE and wait to see if Trinity can pull off modernizing KDE 3 enough for me to mix it back into my daily life. (Konqueror WAS my desktop in KDE3 and, in KDE4 it just doesn’t feel right somehow… not to mention apparently being unmaintained outside of fixes from the KHTML maintainers.)
Firstly I think that Gnome are trying out some interesting ideas but…
I also think they are chasing a myth of the average user and alienating their real users. For example from the proposed changes in nautilus such as removing F3 split view (because the average user might accidentally press 3 and be confused) Gnome seems to think the average user is a dis-coordinated idiot.
Gnome needs to realise that the average Linux user is more tech savvy than the average Windows user not less.
OTOH… http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/12/28/myth-of-sophisticat…
The handful of people who call the shots at Gnome are all Apple fanbois. They love everything ‘Apple’ and especially the totalitarian who ran the corporation for 15 years. Like Jobs they have utter contempt for their own user base. Like Jobs they delight in the in-transparency and the muddled-up world of corporate decision making. Like Jobs they pursue their aims with a persistence that shows the true maniac. But unlike Jobs they don’t have the brain-washing machine of corporate advertising at their disposal, which will ultimately lead to their downfall. Most long-term users of Gnome are still capable to take a step back, look at Gnome 3 and recognize it for the mess that it is. Apple users on the other hand are wallowing in their prisons and are uncritically happy with everything the corporation does to them. A true cult, thanks to devious corporate advertising. Still, nothing will stop team Gnome from pigheadedly pursuing their course. Not even the death of the entire project. They will simply ‘move on’ and continue their harmful work elsewhere because the corporate world loves authoritarians who suffer from ‘visions’. For types like that there’s always a place somewhere.
Bitter much?
Breath slowly, man!
They always have a vision. Every year in fact. Nothing ever happens.
This GnomeOS has been talked about for years, and in many ways it’s already here because Gnome is effectively Linux-only now anyway.
You hear stuff like 10×10 (10% of the desktop market by 2010) and various other things (I think they even had a 20×20) and they just don’t happen. Self-congratulating echo chamber I believe it was called.
Makes sense. They need total control of the underlying system to remove more things.
– Kernel, obviously. Not a single user has ever needed to use that thing.
– Support for files and filesystems has got to go. Those things are legacy crud.
– Everything to do with unicode. If its not a letter or a number, users don’t need it. All those useless characters just confuse people.
– Support for multiple processes. Users are already focusing on single task. Time for entire OS to do the same.
🙂
I’m bullish on GNOME, more so than KDE.
I think Vala, GObject, and GObject introspection is their key to success on the developer front. Invest more in that.
They need a novel platform and to enable a pit of success for the Desktop Linux, meaning out of the box things should just work. I’d even go as far as to try to ink an OEM deal for a “GnomeBox” with hardware and peripherals known to work well with Gnome.
Oh, and they need a proper app store. Leave it up to the ISVs to maintain it, it’ll open up a ton of resources not being used maintaining extensive repositories.
Ever tried KDE 4 on a Pentium II machine?
I have, and I can say with some confidence that it doesn’t work at all. It takes ten minutes to start, and when it’s finished starting none of the widgets respond to mouse clicks because the CPU is too busy cranking away doing nothing useful. And mind you, this is with maybe a dozen KB of swap space being used – it actually fits into 192 MB of RAM, but it’s too much for the CPU and GPU.
Xfce on the other hand works fine, as does Mate. Not fast, but completely usable.
It seems to me like some developers are coding as if there’s no such thing as limited processing power. Which would be okay except for the bad economy, the environmental cost of upgrades, and the untold amounts of blood, sweat, and tears that go into the manufacture of each new computer…
It’s free software. What the developers do with it is their prerogative. Whether what they do is actually a good idea is an entirely different matter IMHO. Personally I hope that projects like Mate and Xfce take off like there’s no tomorrow, and leave the more “modern” desktops in the dust… But that’s just me.
I have had KDE4 working smooth on 450mhz Pentium2 just 2 years ago before I got my current system. It ran better than KDE3 or Gnome2 on my machine. I did not use desktop effects though since i had an old Radeon 8500. But I can say for me KDE4 worked smooth as butter on my PII
I did not use desktop effects though since i had an old Radeon 8500.
There’s your reason. KDE 4 doesn’t like running on low-end, shared-memory integrated graphics chipsets.
Edited 2012-08-10 13:23 UTC
Uhm, the Radeon 8500 is not an integrated chipset, it’s a separate video card. It only supports OpenGL 1.x, though, which is why you have to disable Desktop Effects.
Which is exactly what I’m getting at. Most of my computers use integrated graphics chipsets, which KDE has problems with.
No, why would anyone? The P2 is a 15 year old CPU, it’s not reasonable to expect today’s desktop OS to work well, or even at all, on it.
I don’t think that’s a conclusion you can come to based on the usability on a P2.
Today’s programmers code for today’s computers, not for 15 year old tech. That’s how it has always been.
I’m not sure running 15 year old technology is more environmentally friendly.
No, why would anyone? The P2 is a 15 year old CPU, it’s not reasonable to expect today’s desktop OS to work well, or even at all, on it.
Why is it not reasonable? As far as I can tell, the only things that have significantly changed about normal desktop functionality are
a) what’s expected of multimedia applications
b) what’s expected of browsers
c) what applications are expected to look like
Multimedia is optional (or doesn’t have to be high definition). Eyecandy should be possible to turn off. The only really significant one IMO is browsing, thanks to all the JS-intensive websites out there.
Word processing? Printing? Rendering plain old HTML? How has that stuff changed? (Other than better language support, which even ancient machines have quite enough memory for.)
I don’t think that’s a conclusion you can come to based on the usability on a P2.
Today’s programmers code for today’s computers, not for 15 year old tech. That’s how it has always been.
Point taken, but I’m not entirely sure this is a good state of affairs. The rapid “progress” of computer technology is currently driving an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
I’m not sure running 15 year old technology is more environmentally friendly.
Not in terms of power usage, but as I understand it it’s more friendly in terms of avoiding general pollution, due to how PCs are recycled. I could be wrong though.
And what pray tell,do idoits like yourself consider to be environmentally friendly?
The crap hardware Crapple is churning out these days with non-replaceable things like batteries and other such stuff?
The Gnome Cowards refusal to allow people to actually shut off computers they are not actually using?
Stuff like this?
What runs fine on P2, will do well on some fairly low-powered nimble ARM machine (such “underpowered” gear seems to be in the mission statement of LXDE, for example; and BTW, it runs decently on a PII 266 that I keep around – dual, but still).
Also, consider that there are (last I checked) ~1.3 billion PCs in the world for ~2 billion users – but there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers. I guess costs, unwieldiness, energy requirements of PCs have partly something to do with that.
And there’s lots more to “environmentally friendly” than end-user electricity usage …generally, considering how PCs are made (how many resources they use in the process) and disposed, it tends to be more friendly to keep running older ones as long as feasible (not talking about some always-on servers – just the usual end-user machines seeing intermittent usage)
I’ve run KDE 4.2 or 4.3 on an Asus eeePC 701, the original one, with a 600 MHz Celeron processor and only 256 (or 512?) MB of RAM, using the crappiest Intel video chipset around. Using the plasma-netbook interface. Worked quite nicely, until an update of the Intel video driver started causing horrible screen flicker. Used it as my work “laptop” for several months to diagnose network issues onsite.
I’ve also run KDE 4.3 (or maybe 4.4?) on a 2.8 GHz Celeron laptop with an Ati RADEON 7000 (barely has OpenGL 1.x support). Again, using the plasma-netbook interface. This was my HTPC for several years, playing XviD files over NFS over 54 Mbps wireless in Dragon Player. Worked beautifully. Even my wife could use it.
Me thinks you were doing something wrong, then.
I’ve run KDE 4.2 or 4.3 on an Asus eeePC 701, the original one, with a 600 MHz Celeron processor and only 256 (or 512?) MB of RAM, using the crappiest Intel video chipset around…
I keep hearing stuff like this, and I keep not understanding it. KDE 4 is slow to start and slow to run on my Eee 1005HAB, with a gig of RAM and a dual-core CPU. Kubuntu, OpenSuSE, Fedora, whatever… Default configurations or otherwise, all are quite sluggish.
Needless to say, I would very much like to know how you managed to get KDE 4 in a usable state on a machine with a 600 MHz processor.
Is this the 1980s?
Lets invent a new build system, instead of use the 1000s already out there.
Gnome is a joke.
It’s not surprising out of project that was born from NIH. Say what you like about kde but at least they don’t reinvent the wheel, using cmake etc.
I don’t get what is so special about gnome that requires a special build system…
Who said they’re inventing their own build system rather than using an existing?
I have been trying different DE’s in Linux for the past months and although GNOME 2 had its limitations, nothing can replace it at the moment. XFCE is the only desktop that can get close but still a mile away. I have tried many times Unity and GNOME Shell, and the latest KDE is just so impressive but soon starts to feel very fatty and soon ends up bitter. As for Unity, I think it is better than GNOME Shell but I can’t really buy Shuttleworth ideas on Unity and GNOME Shell itself is a total failure on multi-tasking.
The people who are planning and writing these softwares are production unliterate people and know little about software engineering. Breaking patterns, setting up alien user interfaces only proves that. Most computers are used for work and multitasking. Win7 and GNOME 2 are/was a success for that.
I’d say to linux friends… right now we need a saviour.
The problem is that Gnome3 still totally sucks, and the devs won’t take on board what the end users are saying, namely that they have taken away alot of the things that make Gnome soo easy to use. It totally sucks now, to such an extent that I no longer have it on my pc. I know a minority like it, and thats fair enough, but when does the minority ditate to the majority? This was why I don’t use PCLinuxOS, its a good distro, but I can’t stand Texstar and his attitude.
Now, at the mo I am using Unity, and mainly XFCE, which I have tweaked easily to match my way of working, and I am also being asked to help tweak others systems as well.
For development we use an unmodified Ubuntu system for servers, and Centos for the other servers, but nobody here likes Gnome 3, and thats a shame, but its true. We’re looking at the MATE de, but don’t want to have to rely on Gnome 2 shells, so we’re also looking at Cinnamon, but thats got some quirks and useability issues.
Some on the Gnome lists have told us if we don’t like it to leave, so we have, and no longer contribute to the project, I’m not alone in this, as a number of other well known devs have left or are in the process of leaving and just finalising their code etc so they don’t have to provide anymore updates.
Also, when Fedora starts rumblings that they may well replace Gnome 3 as their default, you start to realise that Gnome is huge huge trouble.
Yes, they’re staring into the abyss, but there is a lifeline, if only they’d tuck tail and accept they were wrong.
Do you have any links? (I’m genuinely interested, not trolling.)
If Gnome loses Redhat support, who’s going to pay the bills?
I am sure that Red Hat is not very content with GNOME Shell and its marketing and production team have been measuring the decline of Fedora popularity since the adoption of this new version.
Someone has just introduced MATE as another option upon installation and it may very well be that the Red Hat developers turn towards MATE. They know the code, and they can sponsor this. This will boom when GNOME shouts its independence as a their own distribution, and it’s the end for them.
It would be very timing to hear what Red Hat has to say about the future of RHEL 7, although this doesn’t affect directly their market, it has been a huge impact on their testbed distro, and I am sure they are not pleased.
Someone from Red Hat said something (last year, or who years ago, I don’t remember) about Gnome beeing Linux only WM. They wanted to stop supporting Solaris and NIX with Gnome. People complained, because Sun was donating Gnome in the past.
I think RH folks are simply pissed off. They asked again and again “when you Canonical write some code for us Linux kernel users?”. And Canonical wrote Unity, Bazaar and Store, basically for Ubuntu only. So now RH is taking their toys including Gnome desktop and prepare it for massive wave of tablet-like computers designed for Windows 8. They do it strictly for themselves. Not for Solaris, NIXes, even not for the rest of Linux world, which now uses heavy modified Gnome (Ubuntu, Mint) or switching default WM for something different.