Gnome: Staring into the abyss • Hacker News Board

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#111

Post by slurgfest » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:13 PM UTC

buster wrote: post #81

acabal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the other way around--it's a shame Gnome chose to built yet-another-window-manager instead of building upon the solid and tested Compiz. Very NIH-y of them. (Though Compiz most certainly has been on a measurable decline since the Natty days. The same laptop ran Natty without a hiccup, but it runs Gnome Classic on Precise with at least one Compiz crash every few hours. Not to mention the many bugs introdu…

Well... http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402 Sooo, all others move away from compiz (which is poorly maintained anyway).

Although Compiz is very, very customizable and hasn't changed all that much in years, so one would think it would appeal to all the people who are screaming about losing customizability and having everything change underneath them.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#112

Post by NiekvdMaas » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:15 PM UTC

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #34

I'm afraid everything desktop Linux, and by extension Gnome, just lost a lot of momentum by developers moving to Apple + web development. Nowadays most focus on open source front seem to be on lower level projects (languages, libraries, servers). FOSS focused on final-user applications remains a niche for academia and developer-centric tools, little has changed compared to what used to be available in the 2000's.

Desktop Linux has not seen growth like Mac OS X in the past few years. Online statistics showing OS browsing data support this, e.g.:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-200807-201207

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Of course this does not include Android, or the numbers would look very different.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#113

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:15 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…

And putting in all those little checkboxes makes a product a horrible experience for the rest of the world.

It doesn't have to. The measure of a good product, as far as I'm concerned, is the extent to which it can retain all the power the power-users want, while still keeping things simple enough for the non-power-users. OR, better yet, the extent to which it can help non-power-users become power-users.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#114

Post by slurgfest » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:15 PM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #65

csense wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity is still crap. It might be suitable for a tablet or a phone, but it'll never fly on the desktop, for any but a tiny subset of users. In case you haven't noticed, most people hate it, and are delaying upgrades, installing Gnome or switching to Mint in droves. One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I want to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see what…

> Unity is still crap. It might be suitable for a tablet or a phone, but it'll never fly on the desktop, for any but a tiny subset of users. In case you haven't noticed, most people hate it, and are delaying upgrades, installing Gnome or switching to Mint in droves. It works well on my laptop. Most people don't hate it. Those who tried earlier versions of it and hated it then (myself included) are pleasantly surprise…

> Most people don't hate it. Those who tried earlier versions of it and hated it then (myself included) are pleasantly surprised when they give it another look.

I don't understand this, because I have used it off and on from the beginning and it really looks completely the same to me.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#115

Post by spartango » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:16 PM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #49

Mr_T_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the attitude of all community developers then free software UI will never become successful.

This is exactly what shapes the areas of success for OSS. It's glaringly obvious looking back, that success perfectly matches the motivation of contributors in different areas. And that said, it doesn't need to be so difficult to include all these pesky checkboxes in a way that they don't confuse or hinder usability for n00bish users. This used to work for Gnome 2. Never met anyone who thought Gnome 2 was too hard or…

Sorry, gnome 2 was hardly 'easy', which is the bar that modern, commercial window managers are setting. 'Not hard' and 'not counter-intuitive' doesn't cut it any more for the bulk of users, who are less savvy than previously.

If there's one thing that Apple and even Microsoft are showing with their window manager and widgets, its that simpler is better, and we've been missing that all these years.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#116

Post by DanBC » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:21 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…

I never understand this.

Why is sane defaults and hidden options a lousy user experience?

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#117

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:25 PM UTC

One more anecdote for you... I'd been a content (if not exactly thrilled) user of Gnome for a decade or so. Then, I bought a new laptop, which prompted me to install Fedora 15, which was my first exposure to Gnome3, as my old laptop was running a really old Fedora version which had Gnome2.

So... after 2-3 hours of Gnome3, I had had more than enough to prompt me to bite the bullet and switch to KDE. There is nothing good I can say about Gnome3... trying to use it was painful in about every way I could imagine. Nothing works the way I expect, and nothing was intuitive at all.

KDE, on the other hand, has been a pleasant surprise. I'd dabbled with it 10+ years ago, but never made the permanent switch... and given that they had gone through their own "change everything and piss off all the users" thing a while back, I wasn't sure what to expect. But after using it a couple of days, I couldn't be happier. It took a few minutes to figure out some of the new approaches they've adopted but - by and large - a little trail and error, some exploration, and intuition, and I was back to productive work almost immediately.

I have no hard feelings towards the Gnome team or anything, but they're just trying to go in a direction that I'm not interested in. Best of luck to Gnome, but KDE is a clearly superior choice for me right now, and I'm thrilled to have made the switch.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#118

Post by kstenerud » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:45 PM UTC

csense wrote: post #35

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 is still crap. It might be suitable for a tablet or a phone, but it'll never fly on the desktop, for any but a tiny subset of users. In case you haven't noticed, most people hate it, and are delaying upgrades, installing Gnome or switching to Mint in droves. One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I want to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see what…

"One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps."

This. It's the one reason I can't stand Unity. I can never find anything. I can never know what controls I can tweak. I don't even know where to look. I end up poking around in the shell or apt to find out what actual programs are available.

Why should I be forced to reach for the keyboard just to load a program? This isn't a C64. It's as backwards as Apple's move away from directories.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#119

Post by jiggy2011 » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #74

fdr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of my coworkers use Unity, and I do too. We're all programmers. Other than it being frustratingly buggy and with a klunky visual design, the general consensus is "meh, went better than I expected". Granted, programmers have a simple workload: web browser, text editor, terminal, done. One thing I like about Unity is how keyboard driven it can be: the application search is not too bad, and the "HUD" feature ac…

I still prefer Awesome, but I've used Unity for a few weeks and I agree that's not that bad (or wouldn't be if it wasn't so buggy). Multiple terminals , for example, is not a problem: Ctrl-Alt-T launches as many as you want.

Or terminator!

Seems the future might be tabs/tiled windows rather than a full taskbar.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#120

Post by mithaler » Fri, Jul 27, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

The key problem with Gnome 3 is that it wants to be both general-purpose and opinionated.

Gnome 2 was an excellent basis for a desktop because there were so many ways it could be used. It didn't limit you; you were free to trim out things you didn't want, or add things you wanted. Aside from that, it got out of the way.

Gnome 3 aims for the same demographic, but tries to force too many opinionated decisions on its users from the start. Distros that care about branding hate that because it makes it hard for them to differentiate (see Ubuntu). Many users hate that because it's too many things that they can't change without learning a new Javascript platform. It's certainly fair to say that typical Linux users (their target market, whether they like it or not) aren't used to that.

This post is wrong to blame tablets and smartphones for the decline. Linux users aren't abandoning desktops; they're abandoning Gnome 3, because it isn't giving them what they want. It's that simple.