3 ms·

You make good points (admittedly to someone not as versed in the finer details as yourself) and I thank you for your reply. Would it have made a difference if

by YooLi 16y ago

You make good points (admittedly to someone not as versed in the finer details as yourself) and I thank you for your reply. Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no? -- "It's supposed to be Gnome and it breaks in subtle ways -> Bad Gnome?" If Ubuntu users do not complain or complain only in Launchpad, wouldn't they also be the type of user who doesn't know what Gnome is unless it's labeled as such? How would they think Gnome is crap if nothing was labeled as Gnome?

darklajid 16y ago
I don't want to claim the expert title either.. :) Regarding the specific questions: I doubt that it would be good if Canonical would actually fork Gnome (or the drop the brand). Leave aside my attachment to the brand as it is: Canonical has done a lot of good things for this platform in the past. I think it would be detrimental so the adoption of Gnome to send them away (or let them leave). A middle ground of some sorts needs to be found. How would those users think Gnome is crap if nothing is labeled as Gnome: Here I was referring to the Gnome ecosystem. If they patch GEdit to do X but it crashes now on every 10th launch, the application is getting the blame. You are right: I'm not sure if the connection between blaming application X and losing faith in the desktop project isn't overly pessimistic, now that I think about it again.
mgunes 16y ago
> Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no? GNOME has never clearly defined the confines of what kind of differentiation is "doing GNOME", and what kind is "breaking away from GNOME". There's also no clear answer to the question of whether GNOME should be a complete end-user product, or a supermarket for makers of end-user products to pick and choose components from, or something in between, or something else. Every distribution patches GNOME. Just about nobody ever uses GNOME as it comes in the tarballs, except for development and bug triage. Moblin, Maemo (now together as MeeGo), OLPC, Nokia and others have shipped vastly differentiated systems meant for different niches built on the GNOME stack, without much anybody labeling them as infidels. If people suddenly hold Ubuntu to a different standard solely on the grounds of differentiation, that's not fair. Differentiation or fragmentation are not going to be the actually problematic parts of the switch to Unity from a community standpoint. The two worst bits of news are: 1) that as an unaffiliated contributor who intends to fix or improve a major part of Ubuntu's default desktop environment, you didn't have to sign a disturbing contributor agreement that doesn't guarantee the freedom of your code in the future until now, but from now on, you probably will 2) Ubuntu's default desktop environment is now a single-stakeholder product that one company will exert very strong control over, regardless of how well they handle the community side. The latter is also incredibly good news UX-wise, but I digress.

by YooLi 16y ago

darklajid 16y ago

I don't want to claim the expert title either.. :) Regarding the specific questions: I doubt that it would be good if Canonical would actually fork Gnome (or the drop the brand). Leave aside my attachment to the brand as it is: Canonical has done a lot of good things for this platform in the past. I think it would be detrimental so the adoption of Gnome to send them away (or let them leave). A middle ground of some sorts needs to be found. How would those users think Gnome is crap if nothing is labeled as Gnome: Here I was referring to the Gnome ecosystem. If they patch GEdit to do X but it crashes now on every 10th launch, the application is getting the blame. You are right: I'm not sure if the connection between blaming application X and losing faith in the desktop project isn't overly pessimistic, now that I think about it again.

mgunes 16y ago

> Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no? GNOME has never clearly defined the confines of what kind of differentiation is "doing GNOME", and what kind is "breaking away from GNOME". There's also no clear answer to the question of whether GNOME should be a complete end-user product, or a supermarket for makers of end-user products to pick and choose components from, or something in between, or something else. Every distribution patches GNOME. Just about nobody ever uses GNOME as it comes in the tarballs, except for development and bug triage. Moblin, Maemo (now together as MeeGo), OLPC, Nokia and others have shipped vastly differentiated systems meant for different niches built on the GNOME stack, without much anybody labeling them as infidels. If people suddenly hold Ubuntu to a different standard solely on the grounds of differentiation, that's not fair. Differentiation or fragmentation are not going to be the actually problematic parts of the switch to Unity from a community standpoint. The two worst bits of news are: 1) that as an unaffiliated contributor who intends to fix or improve a major part of Ubuntu's default desktop environment, you didn't have to sign a disturbing contributor agreement that doesn't guarantee the freedom of your code in the future until now, but from now on, you probably will 2) Ubuntu's default desktop environment is now a single-stakeholder product that one company will exert very strong control over, regardless of how well they handle the community side. The latter is also incredibly good news UX-wise, but I digress.