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Gnome: Staring into the abyss

blogs.gnome.org

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Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#81

Post by buster »

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…

Well... http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402

Sooo, all others move away from compiz (which is poorly maintained anyway).

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#82

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#83

Post by Gabler »

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…

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.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#84

Post by anonymous »

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…

It used to be "by hackers for hackers". Now it's "by enthusiasts for hypothetical everyday users".

Personally, I moved away from gnome when 2.4 (or maybe it was 2.6) took out the "launch a terminal" option from the desktop right-click menu.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#85

Post by hammersend »

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.

First of all that's a straw man as obviously all Free software developers don't feel the way he does. Secondly, it occurs to me that maybe people don't use Gnome 3 because, like me, they just don't like it. I don't like the way it looks, nor do I like the way it works. These days I go between Gnome 2, Unity, and an Open box/fbpanel setup on my different computers. I'm not in love with any of my desktops at the moment but I like them all better than Gnome 3.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#86

Post by yason »

Gnome 3 shattered the experience and momentum.

While Gnome 2 was gradually approaching ultimate goodness with its essential configurability (not too many knobs but an explicit set of gconf properties that you could tune if you wanted to), consistency, ease of use, and ten years of GTK2 providing a platform for applications that look and behave uniformly, it was certainly lacking in the integration side (networking, messaging, etc.) for which Gnome 3 is a response.

However, Gnome 3 broke so many little things that it doesn't matter what the new features do. This is one of the cases where Microsoft has been right: when you're big enough, don't muck with backwards-compatibility.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#87

Post by trekkin »

loftsy wrote: post #42

I'm fascinated that all the real innovation going on in desktop environments (gnome3, unity, windows 8) seems to be taking a hammering. This is possibly just a case of the vocal minority and normal resistance to change but it will be interesting to see it all shake out in a year or two. In my view Gnome should try to emulate the android model. Build the whole stack up to the widget level (they are really good at this…

> I'm fascinated that all the real innovation going on in desktop environments (gnome3, unity, windows 8) seems to be taking a hammering.

Envy-driven development is not a good model. Desktop environments do not need tablet features in the first place...

> This is possibly just a case of the vocal minority and normal resistance to change but it will be interesting to see it all shake out in a year or two.

Or the opposite can be true - a powerful minority (project/company leaders), envious of other companies' success on tablets, decided to spend a lot of resources to try to enter this space, to the detriment of the majority of their (desktop) users.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#88

Post by dsr_ »

nmridul wrote: post #30
Mr_T_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That is exactly the problem and what the parent wants to convey. A developer (specially open source) is rarely interested in developing something that is not useful to him.

I would like to posit that the vast majority successful open-source projects are successful precisely because the developers are avid users.

Motivation goes beyond money.

Re: Gnome: Staring into the abyss

#90

Post by natesm »

ordinary wrote: post #31
Mr_T_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

This isn't true for everyone. I like making nice things. That's the "itch" that I'm scratching, not a hole in my life that I'm trying to fill.
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