Gnome: Staring into the abyss

Post by rootbear » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 1:38 PM UTC

Mr_T_ wrote: post #18

kijin wrote: post #16

1. As the author says toward the end of the article, I think the biggest problem with Gnome nowadays is that only a small number of people actually use it on a day-to-day basis. Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it. No matter what merits Gnome 3 might have, it was such a flop in its first few releases that it has the Windows Vista stigma attached to it. Of course, there's GTK and several Gno…

> Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like slamming the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users, but none of them will ever submit a single patch. An experienced developer should be mature enough to know that he and his kind should not be the target audience of his product. And putting in all those little checkboxes makes a product a horrible experience for the rest of…

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 1:40 PM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #64

sparkie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably worth adding that Qt being C++ is itself a problem - as it makes it inaccessible to the majority of programmers, due to the lack of ABI compatibility with C++ and any other languages. Gtk+ on the other hand, is almost universally accessible, because any language worth using can bind C APIs. Of course, the downside here is that all the Gtk+ bindings to other languages are based on the Gtk+2 API. Gtk+3 hasn't…

> Probably worth adding that Qt being C++ is itself a problem Yep. C++ is what I call a "dead end" language. If you write your code in C++, it will be only usable from C++. If you want to use it from Python, Ruby or whatever, you'll need a C shim in between. If it were written in C, you could use ctypes and other similar means to do FFI quickly. Unfortunately, most languages other than C are more or less a dead end.

Post by dman » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #104

sigzero wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Gnome pre-dates Red Hat and it wasn't Red Hat that made the decision to create GTK. Although I could be wrong.

GTK predates gnome and RedHat, but was (at the start) really just a code layer in the GIMP. Gnome was a response to KDE, and explicitly aimed to produce a KDE-quality Free desktop environment. If they were intellectually honest they'd have abandoned/merged the project when Qt was relicensed.

Post by gnaritas » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:04 PM UTC

abenga wrote: post #25

This is really sad if it's true. I'm probably in the minority, but I think GNOME 3 (even without extensions) is the best Linux desktop at the moment. It does seem strange when you look at it at first, but once you use it for a week or so and use anything different (even GNOME 2 which I'd used for years), you feel stifled in a way. It's hard to put into words, it just feels like it's out of your way. Anecdote: I work…

Post by slurgfest » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:12 PM UTC

Mr_T_ wrote: post #4

mike-cardwell wrote: post #2

This would have worried me back when Unity was crap a year or so ago. Now Unity is actually good, it doesn't matter if Gnome dies a slow death; we'll still have multiple good alternatives that are still being enhanced.

Unity shares a lot of core infrastructure with Gnome. If Gnome has problems, Unity+Ubuntu will have problems as well. And Unity has the same bus factor and even less community developers or developers from other companies: if Canonical is hit by a bus (which is not entirely unlikely if it doesn't become profitable) the project is doomed.