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Gnome: Staring into the abyss

blogs.gnome.org

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Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#171

Post by ebassi »

tytso wrote: post #100
ebassi wrote: post #38

as one of the two people mentioned by name in Benjamin's blog post, I'd like to point out that I didn't "leave GNOME" (to work on other stuff). I am still involved in the community, I am a director of the foundation's board, and I'm still working on Gnome projects in my spare time - which is actually easier these days since I moved from intel to mozilla. I'm typing this from GUADEC 2012, in A Coruña; the conference i…

I'd love to hear how you think you're going to regain the enthusiasts' market. Care to say more? In particular, which enthusiasts? The ones who have already (like me) switched to Xfce? Or some other set of enthusiasts? Defining your market is important; if GNOME is going to continue to have a severe case of Mac-envy, I doubt you'll be able to also get back the enthusiasts --- and I don't think GNOME has enough develo…

"enthusiasts" are not just "computer enthusiasts"; I want to excite users and make them care about Gnome - and I want to get excited, interested users, to contribute back to the community by making it dead easy to do so: create interesting apps, create documentation, create content, organize and attend events. in Gnome we have amazing outreach programs that give us new contributors every year - and most of them stick around, because we're a cool (even if sometimes too much introspective) community, where people care about people first, and software second.

I don't see Gnome as suffering from "Mac-envy" - mostly because everyone envies Apple's profits and margins, if not their user share; I mean, who wouldn't envy Apple. we don't have the resources to do multi-year usability studies involving tons of people; and we still lack the tools like Telemetry to get (consensual) user feedback. so we need to take inspiration in our designs and plans from stuff that others are doing, as well as doing our own thing. I mean, the GNOME 3 shell overview is basically Mission Control from Lion - but we designed it in 2008, well before Lion screenshots were released or leaked to the press; who copied who? ;-)

competing with Apple is also a false goal; we want to keep the keep the users free, as well as providing them tools and an environment that allows them to achieve their goals in a simple and delightful way. that will put us up against Apple, and Microsoft, and Samsung, and basically everyone. it never stopped us for the past 15 years, I don't think it will stop us now.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#172

Post by mietek »

riffraff wrote: post #79
mietek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Digitizor just try to silently follow themselves on Twitter using my account? I got an Access Denied error from Twitter on the following URL: https://platform2.twitter.com/widgets/follow_button.html?_=1309323676493&align=&button=blue&id=twitter_tweet_button_4&lang=en&link_color=&screen_name=digitizor&show_count=&show_screen_name=&text_color=&original_redirect_referrer=http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvald…

I think it's only the twitter "follow" widget

This happened without me interacting with any widgets, just by opening the original URL.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#173

Post by rnadna »

If the existence of both GNOME and KDE has held back developers who are reluctant to halve their user community or double their coding efforts, then the collapse of GNOME may be a good thing.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#174

Post by niclupien »

ajross wrote: post #127
Gabler wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really did want to like Gnome 3 but just nothing about it made me want to use it over Unity. I'm a fairly new Linux user who has used quite a bit of Unity, Gnome 3 and Gnome 2. Gnome 2 is great, I wouldn't hold onto Gnome 3 just because I want to stay away from Unity. Without add-ons of some kind Gnome 3 was completely unusable for anything I wanted to use it for.

Just as a counterpoint: I'm of exactly the opposite opinion. I just couldn't get used to unity. The full-screen assumptions in early versions were baked too far into the metaphor and I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Gnome 3, on the other hand, brought new stuff to the table (like the dynamic desktops) which actually improved my workflow. It wasn't a clean transition, but I actually prefer it now.

Same thing here. Gnome Shell integrates perfectly with my workflow while Unity does not. I would like to leave Gnome 3 for something better, but that thing is definitely not Unity. I really don't understand all the hate about Gnome 3. There is pros and cons like every other window manager. I use it everyday (mainly for coding and system administration) and it's very stable and it got everything I need and well configured by default.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#175

Post by nnythm »

mindcrime wrote: post #117

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 g…

I had a similar experience, where I found that none of my computers, neither my six year old laptop, nor my one year old laptop (!) could support GNOME 3, which has essentially prevented me from upgrading my fedora from 14. Since Fedora is currently on version 17, this makes me sad, and ruminating about which OS to jump ship to.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#176

Post by ef4 »

mseepgood wrote: post #94
octotoad wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this over the years when reading developer blogs via sites like Planet GNOME. In the first half of the last decade, there seemed to be highly motivated, talented groups of contributors who helped build and maintain momentum in many popular open source projects like Gnome. I'm not saying there aren't top notch developers still working on FOSS, but many of those big-name 'rockstar' contributors seem to hav…

> but many of those big-name 'rockstar' contributors seem to have either been lured to a competing/alternative platform Many have been hired by companies, e.g. Nokia, and now don't want to work for free again.

You seem to imagine that all those contributors were once unemployed. That was never the case.

The typical open source developer has always been either (1) gainfully employed at a programming day job, (2) employed to actually build FOSS, or (3) in academia.

There's at least as much open source development going on now as ever before. It's just that the attention has shifted away from desktop apps.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#177

Post by tytso »

mseepgood wrote: post #50
zalew wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One word: Xfce

Xfce has more manpower than Gnome? Xfce has achieved the transition to GTK+ 3? (both rhetorical questions)

I don't want XFCE to transition to GTK+3. As near as I can tell it's a nightmare, since it's so tightly tied to GNOME (fair enough, but I switched to Xfce to escape the tyranny of the GNOME UI designers).

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#178

Post by Tloewald »

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #150
rootbear wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree with the second sentence. There must be a way for power users to get the flexibility they want, while making the product usable by the masses. MacOS does this to an extent, with "Advanced" buttons on some control panels that most users ignore. Why couldn't Gnome do that? Why must it seek to emulate Windows' lack of flexibility?

Funny thing about windows' lack of flexibility is amount of "WTF, I can't do that either?!" exclamations I had when I started working om mac. I still can't find a way to change default text background across the board on mac (from white to pleasing greenish color).

In general the kind of thing you are talking about on the Mac is app specific if the app developer thinks it should be an option. From way back Apple's design philoshy has been "don't provide the user with too many pointless choices" and Microsoft's has been "allow the user or, more likely, the sysadmin to choose".

By the same token there's no way to do this for the web. (you can override style sheets willy nilly but don't expect a lot of stuff to work).

I suggest you might need to get used to reading text on backgrounds that aren't a "pleasing greenish" color, write all your own software, or learn to live in a world of pain.

Instead of allowing people to set the default edit field background to magenta (which windows does) Apple spent engineering effort on, say, universal access.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#179

Post by cs702 »

This is fallout of a battle-by-proxy between Red Hat (Gnome's de facto sponsor) and Canonical (Unity's sponsor) for the future of Desktop Linux. Canonical seems to be winning.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#180

Post by Produce »

wtracy wrote: post #153
Produce wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it. This is news to me since my colleague, running Ubuntu 12.04 is using Gnome/Unity. Did I miss a memo?

Unity completely replaces the Gnome shell. According the Gnome people, you're no longer using Gnome if you're not using the Gnome shell. Whether that's true is open to interpretation.

That makes sense then - I wasn't aware of the fact that Gnome Shell and Unity were distinct. Thanks for the memo!
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