4 ms·
I've been using Linux since about the same time, and while I find the five-broken-implementations thing rather exhausting at times, I am more than thankful for
by alxlaz 8y ago
I've been using Linux since about the same time, and while I find the five-broken-implementations thing rather exhausting at times, I am more than thankful for it. It's one of the reasons why Linux (and FOSS software) is so damn useful.
Just look at Windows land, where they do have one implementation to rule them all, more or less (Windows 10). Everyone who dislikes its telemetry or almost touch-only interface is either stuck with Windows 7, which won't be an option for much longer, or is stuck venting against Microsoft and grumpily installing hacks like ClassicShell to make things a little more bearable.
When Gnome 3 came up, everyone who liked the new direction kept using it, everyone else moved to Cinnamon or Mate (or XFCE, KDE...)
It's not just about competition, it's about being able to pursue different visions and different objectives.
Users only see this in terms of choice, but there's a great deal of value about it for developers as well.
- bluedino 8y agoI really want to know how GNOME 3 even saw the light of day, and why distros like Fedora even went with it. Unusable.
- pjmlp 8y agoEasy, Red-Hat used to pay the salaries for a big chunk of GTK/GNOME developers.
- AsyncAwait 8y agoGNOME 3 is also far from universally deemed unusable, (I use it daily with great success), despite what the propaganda would have you believe.
- pjmlp 8y agoI tried to use GNOME 3 after Ubuntu dropped Unity, and it never performed like Unity, hence I am now using XFCE. The latest updates, show there is still work left to do in this area, https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/monday-25th-february-2019/9959/2 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/monday-25th-february-2019/995...
- alxlaz 8y agoPretty much this, I'd say. I know people who like its design and find it very comfortable. I'm definitely not one of them but fortunately no one heeded the calls to just build one desktop environment to rule them all :).
- rbanffy 8y agoI'm using Gnome shell since the early days and, so far, I'm very happy with it. But, then, I also use macOS on my Macs and I'm very happy with them too. All of them run everything I throw at them just fine. I find the lack of options to customize GNOME irrelevant - I'm way past the day I cared about the wallpaper or the icons or the colors of the window chrome. I pay attention to what's inside the window, not its border. The other day I fired up a Solaris 10 VM so I could give Wikipedia a proper Solaris/CDE screenshot and I was surprised it's actually still usable - the terminals are responsive and the rest, oh well... You don't want to use a GUI to copy files, do you?