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Gnome: Staring into the abyss

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Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#71

Post by mseepgood »

acabal wrote: post #63
buster wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, knew about compiz, that's why it's a shame that Canonical chose this direction instead of putting more developer efforts into the gnome stuff.

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…

No. Mutter is not "yet-another-window-manager". It's an evolution of the Metacity code base (Mutter = Metacity + Clutter). So the Gnome developers basically continued using their window manager instead of hopping to yet-another-window-manager.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#72

Post by keithpeter »

RHEL 7 will be based on Fedora 18

http://rhel7.net/news/98-rhel-7-roadmap

which means we might see RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux/PUIAS users on Gnome 3.6

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18

Personally, I've worked out I spend little time actually using the overall desktop GUI, so I'm not too sensitive to changes in UI logic. Typical end user I suppose.

I suspect the change to systemd will cause rather more fur to fly than the GUI in Enterprise circles.

I hope the author of the original article gets a bit of support and finds a direction for his labours.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#73

Post by yxhuvud »

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…

> Some features -- like the Mac-like "there's only one instance of each application" -- seem designed to

What? If you want a new instance, middle click on the icon instead of the normal left click. How the heck is this a major pain point?

As for terminals, either use the above mentioned method or use C-A-t to get a new terminal.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#74

Post by icebraining »

fdr wrote: post #48
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…

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.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#75

Post by maigret »

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.

> Unfortunately, most languages other than C are more or less a dead end.

Except for Java, where you can reuse code directly with JVM-compiling stacks like Clojure.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#76

Post by zokier »

Mr_T_ wrote: post #37
ordinary wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay me, I will work selflessly for the masses. I will implement features I don't need, I will fix bugs I don't care about and I will write documentation for features I already know in and out. If you don't pay me, I will still contribute, but then I will work only to scratch my own itch. I will implement features, but only those I want to have myself; I will fix bugs, but only those that annoy me personally; I…

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

It might not be successful in a Apple way, but I'd be willing to sacrifice that to get more projects that are successful in emacs way.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#77

Post by MrUnderhill »

I've always wondered why the platform Blender uses hasn't turned into a generic UI toolkit or even window manager. Granted, Blender itself is rather overwhelming at first glance, but you only have to spend a few minutes with it to fall in love with the snappiness and adaptivity of the interface.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#78

Post by octotoad »

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.

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 have either been lured to a competing/alternative platform, or just simply lost interest.

I often wonder if age plays an important role, with many former wide-eyed, young, idealistic developers possibly adopting an attitude along the lines of "meh. Maybe I should just buy a Mac and worry less about ideals and philosophies" as they get older and priorities change.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#79

Post by riffraff »

mietek wrote: post #29
CrazedGeek wrote: post #6

This is the (dead) G+ post by Linus that he refers to: http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome...

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

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#80

Post by aerique »

VMG wrote: post #19
Mr_T_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What these articles never mention is a follow-up comment by Torvalds: "And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse" https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...

This is also the way I feel. I don't quite like Gnome3 but it seems like the least worst option at the moment for me. Tiling window managers, fluxbox etc: too much configuration, not sexy enough Xfce: also doesn't look as slick, bugs KDE: sluggish I really like the Expose(?)-feature and really would miss it

Just to chip in on the tiling window managers: i3[1] is a really nice one which doesn't need a lot of configuration. Since switching from Window Maker, which I had been using for 10+ years, it has been the only window manager that didn't make me switch back.

(I tried out Xmonad, Awesome, Stumpwm and some other window managers over the years. Awesome was pretty close to awesome.)

i3 has a couple of issues I like to see resolved but all-in-all I'm very happy with it.

[1] http://i3wm.org/

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