22 ms·

On the Graying of Gnome

139 points by yankcrime 6y ago

bigdict 6y ago
The graphs are absolutely fantastic, what a great job on the visual presentation. They read very intuitively.
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  I especially like the histogram with the per-month bins. It shows clearly both the tendency of developers to leave over time and the fluctuation due to release cycle. The affiliation graph is also interesting. I think if I were to put a number on how much I liked GNOME in each year, there would be an inverse correlation with the percentage of developers that come from Red Hat (with 1999 being an outlier -- I was a fan of both Red Hat and GNOME back then).
29athrowaway 6y ago
Gnome 3 was a big departure from what users were used to in Gnome 2. In Gnome 2 you could configure panels by simply dragging and dropping elements. In Gnome 3, this customization is achieved by installing extensions or Gnome shell themes. Installing extensions can be easy, but it will never be as easy as dragging and dropping elements with your mouse. For many years, when you used XFCE and then went back to Gnome 3, you could perceive how much slower Gnome 3 was. Now, performance has gotten much better to the point Gnome 3 is my default desktop again. You can tell there are users are still disgusted with the Gnome 3 UI. That's why the MATE and Cinnamon projects exist.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Any gnome extension I've installed I came to regret it without exception (on Ubuntu). They always ended up breaking something in a fatal way where even after uninstalling them would leave the damage. For example now my windows won't snap to half the screen edges (to take up half the screen) any more, just randomly. That's just one example. Extensions have always caused me headache and mess. People often claim Linx desktops are "there" today, but the lack of polish and glitches are still painful. Not horrible, but not comparable to Windows or Mac. It's surely solid enough to use as the main daily OS, but you really have to stick to the defaults as customization often breaks stuff.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    I would not extend this situation to every desktop environment.
  - jamienicol 6y ago
    On Mac I can't tile windows without installing a third party app, on gnome I can. On windows three finger swiping between desktops when the task view is open is horrible, but gnome handles it perfectly. I use gnome, mac, and windows daily. They all have pros and cons, but I can't see how anyone could claim Windows or Mac are well ahead of gnome.
fuoqi 6y ago
While I am a long-time Gnome user, I don't think it has a bright future. The project leadership continuously makes weird decision rooted in the believe that Gnome is THE Linux DE and everyone should dance under their flute. It does not help that project is riddled with technical issues (most notably memory leaks), quite inconvenient without installing a number of extensions (which often break from versions to version, no stable extension API, really? JS as the extension language does not help either) and fiddling with settings (e.g. to enable Ctrl+Alt+Left/Right with grid workspace layout). I don't have time to play with different DEs right now, but as soon as I find a suitable replacement, I quite probably will ditch Gnome for good. Unfortunately, Gnome sucks a lot of corporate support, leaving alternative DEs quite dry in that regard, which significantly hinders their pace of development. P.S.: The animated favicon is REALLY f*g annoying.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  The decision to not render icons using nautilus anymore, and instead use Gnome shell to render them was an awful decision. The Gnome shell desktop extension is not as robust as nautilus. If you move a file by dragging and dropping a file, there is a good chance that Gnome shell will hang. I disabled the desktop icons extension because of this.
  - PuercoPop 6y ago
    In principle it was the right decision. Opening an application shouldn't take over the root window. The was specially obvious for people who don't use gnome but use nautilus. The problem is that as you mention "The Gnome shell desktop extension is not as robust as nautilus"
    - 29athrowaway 6y ago
      If I have nautilus extensions for different purposes, those won't be available for the desktop because it's managed by the desktop icons extension. It makes the file management experience inconsistent. That is not the case on macOS or Windows.
- 6y ago
shmerl 6y ago
I wish KDE and Gnome efforts were consolidated - that would have sped up the progress of the Linux desktop, but what can you do. I personally prefer KDE. Stuff like switch to Wayland takes decades because of this split.
- war1025 6y ago
  > Stuff like switch to Wayland takes decades because of this split. My understanding is the switch to Wayland has taken ages because basically everyone who thought it would be a "quick" thing vastly underestimated the number of stakeholders they would need to get on board with the change and how much work would need to go into making those people consent to switching.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    Yeah, Wayland is mostly a regression for my use cases: client-side decorations, breaking screen recording/sharing etc. I know there are theoretical issues with the X security mode, but this replacement is a classic case of “security” producing something that’s basically useless for what people use the software for. Also, because X works over a socket, it’s language-agnostic in a way that a library just can’t be: libraries like CLX allow Common Lisp graphical applications with no dependency on a C library.
    - eitland 6y ago
      > I know there are theoretical issues with the X security mode, but this replacement is a classic case of “security” producing something that’s basically useless for what people use the software for. I keep reminding people that one of the most known models for security is "confidentiality, integrity and availability". If it isn't available your security is still somehow broken however well one scores on confidentiality.
      - canofbars 6y ago
        Wayland security is not broken. Its just a single piece in a much longer term goal that spans many components. Linux was not designed for the current era where users run untrusted and borderline malicious programs regularly. While wayland may secure the desktop, there are 20 other places where programs can scoop up your data. It looks useless now but without every part being fixed individually it will be impossible to create a secure linux desktop that runs proprietary applications.
bigbubba 6y ago
It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails. This correlates with my experience as a Gnome user, as it was Gnome 3 where the project really took on a condescending user-demeaning attitude. Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.' I now tell novices to use XFCE instead.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  Why not KDE? It easily seems like the best Linux DE, and it's so weird that Gnome is so often the default in comparison. As a bonus, all the best Linux apps are Qt-based (e.g., Dolphin [compared to which any other file manager, including Windows's Explorer, will seem unusable], Okular, Gwenview, Clementine, and Kate).
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    I used KDE for a while and liked it, but KDE 4.0 burned me and I never looked back. I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. Okular, and gwenview were always nice, even during 4.0 days. Amarok used to be great, though I've not tried Clementine and I'm no longer a user of that sort of music library software. The reason I don't recommend KDE today is because I'm just not very familiar with it.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      > I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. I'm using KDE since 3.5.x including 4.0 release train. Its infinitely better. Stable, fast, extensible and infinitely useful (esp. Dolphin's services). I'm not using too many widgets and/or activities, but it's better than anything I use (incl. macOS, albeit they're close).
    - topspin 6y ago
      It's safe to come back. The bad old days are long past; KDE is a great DE and you should revisit now. Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is an excellent choice and will serve you for many years.
  - 6y ago
Avamander 6y ago
``` GNOME has become more conservative, certainly much more so than it was a decade ago in the run-up to GNOME 3. The rationale and phrasing in the announcement of the new versioning scheme (e.g. “Radical technological and design changes are too disruptive for maintainers, users, and developers”) seems indicative of this trend[1]. ``` This is very perceptible in many projects. Quite a few projects are not willing to innovate - use new and better tools, migrate to a new language standard, drop legacy compatibility and so on. Thankfully the nature FOSS allows new forks to emerge and slowly get rid of the dead hand of the past.
rubyn00bie 6y ago
Hmmm, while I have generally been singing nothing but praise for my migration to the Linux desktop. I will, as someone new and lurking around contributing, speak about something that make me hesitant to try and/or turn me off or away. This is only my two-cents as an outsider. I think some of the issues[1] that matter to people have seen no traction over long periods of time and the answer is "it's hard; we'll get to it, leave us alone." And of course, if you look up who these people are, telling you to leave them alone, they are absolutely fucking brilliant people... they certainly know the scope and difficulty. The thing is, these folks are very likely, insanely busy and the longer their lives/careers go on; the less time they'll likely have to devote to seemingly unimportant, to them, but difficult issues. That's life. Zero hate and only thanks to the kind brilliant folks who have spent countless hours donating that brilliance to the world... But then, this poses the big question of: what am I, the less brilliant, to do? What can I do? What other problems require your brilliance or expertise? Lurking through other issues gives me a sense of "not qualified" and I eventually stroll away. Maybe folks, who are qualified and don't realize it, also walk away. I'll very likely contribute to apps using GTK since it's a really nice experience and other parts of the Gnome ecosystem; but I don't know if I'll ever contribute to Gnome proper. [1] I don't particularly want to identify specific issues because I don't think the nice folks who maintain it deserve to be inundated with noise like "fix plz 10yers."
- thechao 6y ago
  Hey... being smart simplifies some aspects of problem solving, but being smart isn’t necessary to solving problems. One of the better engineers I worked with, while very slow, was extremely thorough. If you had a long-horizon project that had to go at absolutely light speed, you’d set him on the project; two years down the road and the core “inner loops” would be a non-issue. Even Mike Abrash admitted this guy was the absolute pinnacle for this sort of programming.
- 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
  Actually, one of the best things you can do to have an impact is to improve a project's communication. Find out what isn't documented and document it. Research issues and get the back-story and architectural decisions. Help people understand each other. Draw out details that might be gumming up someone's attempts to start working on an issue. Help manage and coordinate the work. Discover if old problems are no longer a problem. Find ways to sell something when you are at loggerheads with someone, or find alternate solutions. This is the kind of stuff that gets business projects done in half the time with twice the quality. Nobody has time to do it, but actually it takes almost no technical skill to do; somebody just needs to be hired to do it.
boudewijnrempt 6y ago
All this wibbling about GNOME 3 and so on -- it's just not relevant to the data in the original article. The same thing happened to KDE at the time. The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous. And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012. By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone.
- ginko 6y ago
  That explains KDE's decline (Nokia owned Qt), but not Gnome.
  - boudewijnrempt 6y ago
    Yes, it does, because Nokia had its fingers in both bowls of porridge, to the extent where people like Michael Meeks were fighting really hard to keep a small library like kcalendar out of Maemo. Nokia started with GTK and when they went to Qt, they never stopped their involvement with GTK/GNOME -- they seemed to have expected the idiots in both camps to just work together for the good of free software, and like the idiots we were, we didn't. Good grief, the painful conversations we had after the Dublin MeeGo conf ended, between people from both camps... I was there; I wrote code; I had employees, I went to the various conferences and trade shows. My company provided one of the default apps on the N9...
    - basicneo 6y ago
      What are your thoughts on the Pinephone? What would a reasonable goal for success look like? How can it be achieved? What would cause it to fail?
      - boudewijnrempt 6y ago
        It's not going to replace the enormous investment Nokia made into the free software/linux community... So it won't help the graphs the original article showed. But by another measure, it's already a success since it exists.
spekcular 6y ago
Can someone please tell me what I should use then, if I just want a memory efficient, aesthetically pleasing, no-fuss experience (coming from mac OS)? KDE? It has issues too, but I wonder if they're as severe. Heavily customized GNOME? It's possible, but that's extra work [0]. As much as I love to tweak my i3 config and enjoy trying to be keyboard-only as much as possible, I'm not enough of a poweruser to justify it and the cognitive overhead just slows me down. (I believe Apple came to this conclusion decades ago, too.) I just want to point, click, get work done without bugs or crashes. [0] See e.g. https://gist.github.com/eh8/38fc8240ce4c8fd2e0ae065410045cd5 https://gist.github.com/eh8/38fc8240ce4c8fd2e0ae065410045cd5
- zaptheimpaler 6y ago
  nothing on Linux comes close to Mac. elementary OS looks pretty good though
  - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
    Is this a technical opinion backed up by facts, or merely an aesthetic one? We've got three OS's in our house, and honestly, apart from individually subjective things such as whether and where you want a dock, I don't feel the display manager or aesthetics are inherently any better or worse under my Ubuntu Desktop than Mac OS. Honestly though, I'd say the same for windows 10. The truth is for the last 5 years or so we seem to be yo-yoing around in some local minimum of GUI interfaces. I can't honestly put my hand on my heart and rate any of them over any of the others in terms of user experience.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      I love Ubuntu and it's the only tolerable desktop Linux that let's me get something done instead of constantly fixing the OS and searching for workarounds. But even Ubuntu and Gnome have frequent glitches. They are minor annoyances that I can't even list well. Stuff like an icon would get stuck to the mouse cursor and I have to lock the screen and unlock again to fix it. Or I'd get light text on light background in the context menu. Or the font gets messed up randomly. Or alt tab works weirdly (yes I searched and fiddled with it, it's still not how I expect it). Many more small things. I should make a list but then again, I'm trying to get stuff done, no to compile meticulous bug reports.
diegocg 6y ago
Gnome has historically been written in C (after having played with Obj C and C++, which they didn't like), and while it has adopted other languages like js, large parts of it are still written in C/Glib. I don't find surprising that people don't find writing desktops apps in C attractive. That's in fact why the mono guys tried to make people use C# (previously, Sun had employed quite a lot of desktop people and of course they had pushed for Java, so there were some Java/GTK apps done by them and nobody else). The C# push lasted some years but eventually died because Linux enthusiasts never liked a MS technology that run code in a memory-hungry VM. Then, someone created Vala - a way to get the syntax advantages of a modern language like C#, without depending on a C# runtime. Once again not everybody liked the idea of transpiling a language not used anywhere but in Gnome, so not everybody adopted it, and these days it seems to be mainly popular in the Elementary desktop. Then came the new trend: Javascript. The Gnome people has a strange addiction to following trends, so of course they decided that the future of the Gnome platform was Javascript, the definitive language that everybody will use in the future. It turns out, Javascript's GC didn't play very well with Glib's reference counting, but nobody thought that well before basing the desktop's entire shell on it, so for years the Gnome Shell became a memory hog that would eat hundreds of MB of RAM that would not get freed because of the interaction between the two memory management systems. That lasted until quite recently. Now there are some parts of Gnome pushing for Rust. Fortunately for Gnome, Rust may be good enough to actually become a final destination for them, but even then not many people seem to be using it? Anyway, my point is that in the modern Gnome desktop, you may end up running a Javascript shell running on top of a Glib/GTK core, then some huge C apps like Evolution and Gimp, then others written in Vala or even C# and now Rust. Gnome has been searching for a C replacement for too long, maybe they should stick to one language, and create a really solid platform in order to attract more people instead of switching targets every few years
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Which is also why in what concerns Xamarin roadmap, macOS, Windows, iOS and Android are what matter, with Linux left for the community.
russellbeattie 6y ago
Ah, 23 years of, "If you don't like it, use something else," and "If you want that feature so badly, like being able to choose a desktop background color, code it yourself. It's open source." It's sort of comforting in a way, the consistency. The Gnome project will always be 80% of what people want in a desktop environment, and 20% screw you.
modzu 6y ago
i just came here to post some love for gnome. linux would be worse without it. of course there are 2001 ways to run linux on the desktop, but in terms of full on desktop environments, that say a user from windows or mac could pick up and use, gnome nails it. i think honestly much of the frustration is that gnome seems to have so much potential, it could be astounding, sometimes seems to be in its own way, but personally my bet is gnome has a long future yet
teunispeters 6y ago
Gnome 3 went the wrong way, pushing for apple aesthetics without apple functionality. I mean on apple, I can launch a console and through every upgrade still get the "same" console back, usually with some scrollback for context. That was lost entirely after gnome 2. I mean that's a "minor" thing but as a developer that cost me wanting to do any further development, which I'd been working on getting into. And then there was needing to run master versions of everything and not distribution versions, which made things amazingly disruptive to work on a computer that also had to do other tasks (eg : job work). This has since gotten reachable if you have really giant hard drives, but that's budget too... anyway the walls were so high then I walked away, and nothing has suggested they've gotten any easier or any more worth climbing. Rule 1 for any UI design team is don't copy Apple. (or if you do, justify it. "because Apple" isn't good enough. Even Apple isn't sticking to this).
- kergonath 6y ago
  For all this talk about the Mac-ification of GNOME, as a primarily Mac user I absolutely cannot stand Gnome 3. There is nothing Mac-like about it, it is just bland, weird, and terrible. MacOS does not force you to use the Launchpad, for example. The menu bar is still here. The Dock works as it always had. To me one of the worst developments of the Mac UI recently is the disappearance of title bars, but this was a thing in Gnome long before it caught on at Apple. A decently configured KDE or XFCE is much better, and much closer to how a Mac works.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    The main issue with Linux desktops is that they can only provide part of the experience, because they don't control the whole stack, so there is no "decently configured" out of the box, neither for users nor for desktop developers. Hence why the two most successful OS based on Linux are using it as an implementation detail for a Web runtime, and a Java/Kotlin runtime, alongside standard ISO C/C++, POSIX subset and some specific OS frameworks. On GNU/Linux the moment someone tries to impose such vertical stacks, a fork lies waiting.
    - 6y ago
jrm4 6y ago
Long time Linux user, not much of a programmer for context, but. Gnome 3 literally shouldn't even be called "Gnome." Probably MATE should. It's not that you have to keep every little thing, sometimes you do have to backwards break; e.g. sure, Python 3 is still Python. But Gnome's model broke so much that it really shouldn't have kept the name.
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  I feel somewhat the same way, but I also wonder whether the same project with a different name would have been successful.
fartcannon 6y ago
KDE/Plasma for the ex-Windows user, Gnome for the ex-Mac user. It's simple.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  If you don't mind a more obscure one, your average Mac user might be into Pantheon from elementaryOS
- scns 6y ago
  I recommend Cinnamon on Mint for Mac users. It includes Timeshift for backups and other polished tools from the Mint team. They even package chromium as a package themselves instead of shipping a snap (which they removed and replaced by flatpak) [edit: add sentence abuot chromium]
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
I don't get why projects like these don't simply change their design to allow more flexibility and merge into one mega-project. Rather than have Gnome VS KDE fighting it out, why not simply choose one as a base, and hack it up to allow for the other one's functionality? Both teams could then use a shared codebase, and provide tailored customizations of how to run it. I can't imagine that it's impossible to make GNOME work like KDE, or KDE work like GNOME, with some small code tweaks. In other words, if you have two different window systems with two different ways to manage a call to a part of the window... just pick one. Then have the "other team" add any missing functionality. Then give it to the app devs, so the devs can make their apps according to the one standard system, so users can use the one standard system and get on with their lives. How you implement it is trivial technicalities, because, as a user-facing application, the only important thing is the functionality that users want. Getting in the way of what the users want means you don't care about them, and then why should they use your thing?
- sergeykish 6y ago
  GNOME and KDE are not the only desktop environments on Linux [1]. MATE forked from Gnome 2, much closer than KDE yet they are separate projects. Trinity forked from KDE 3, XFCE is a GTK based project. Imagine same argument for macOS and Windows (if that was possible) — lets merge UI. It would be complete disaster, hated by both camps. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/desktop_environment https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/desktop_environment
  - 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
    I would love it if they had the same programmatic interface, but allowed different distributions and customizations of the interface. It doesn't matter how the code works, it matters what the user experience is. So keep the code the same but provide a different user experience if you want. Can you imagine if roads were designed so only specific cars could drive on them, and so in order to have different vehicles, we had to build completely different sets of roads??
    - 6y ago
TheCabin 6y ago
Very interesting article, thanks for sharing the information. FWIW, I used to be very happy with the Gnome environment but 2 recent (nautilus related) changes frustrate me incredibly: * Copy / paste file paths from nautilus to terminal is broken. (You get this extra meta information in the path starting with `x-special/nautilus-clipboard`) * Type ahead is gone. Previously you could type the first letters of a file / folder and select it this way. Now typing automatically triggers a search (equivalent to ctrl+f), which is much slower. These might be minor things but I hit them so often that I was driven away from Gnome.
- absove 6y ago
  If you don't mind pulling a bunch of cinnamon dependencies along with it, you can use nemo (the cinnamon file manager) as a nautilus replacement in gnome. The search behavior you mentioned in particular is very annoying with nautilus.
  - TheCabin 6y ago
    Thanks for the tip. I'll probably give this a shot.
roel_v 6y ago
Oh, Gnome... I was a really into it in the late 1990's. Haven't used it for many years, except the occasional time I set up a Raspberry Pi and plug it into a monitor. For the sake of nostalgia I follwed a few of the links in the post and it took me all of 3 click to find this page (current top post in Gnome Discord) : https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-desktop-icons/4949/13 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-desktop-icons/4949/13 which was a painful reminder of why I gave up on 'Linux on the desktop' and pretty much 'open source for end users' overall.

139 points by yankcrime 6y ago

bigdict 6y ago

The graphs are absolutely fantastic, what a great job on the visual presentation. They read very intuitively.

curlypaul924 6y ago
I especially like the histogram with the per-month bins. It shows clearly both the tendency of developers to leave over time and the fluctuation due to release cycle. The affiliation graph is also interesting. I think if I were to put a number on how much I liked GNOME in each year, there would be an inverse correlation with the percentage of developers that come from Red Hat (with 1999 being an outlier -- I was a fan of both Red Hat and GNOME back then).

29athrowaway 6y ago

Gnome 3 was a big departure from what users were used to in Gnome 2. In Gnome 2 you could configure panels by simply dragging and dropping elements. In Gnome 3, this customization is achieved by installing extensions or Gnome shell themes. Installing extensions can be easy, but it will never be as easy as dragging and dropping elements with your mouse. For many years, when you used XFCE and then went back to Gnome 3, you could perceive how much slower Gnome 3 was. Now, performance has gotten much better to the point Gnome 3 is my default desktop again. You can tell there are users are still disgusted with the Gnome 3 UI. That's why the MATE and Cinnamon projects exist.

bonoboTP 6y ago
Any gnome extension I've installed I came to regret it without exception (on Ubuntu). They always ended up breaking something in a fatal way where even after uninstalling them would leave the damage. For example now my windows won't snap to half the screen edges (to take up half the screen) any more, just randomly. That's just one example. Extensions have always caused me headache and mess. People often claim Linx desktops are "there" today, but the lack of polish and glitches are still painful. Not horrible, but not comparable to Windows or Mac. It's surely solid enough to use as the main daily OS, but you really have to stick to the defaults as customization often breaks stuff.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  I would not extend this situation to every desktop environment.
- jamienicol 6y ago
  On Mac I can't tile windows without installing a third party app, on gnome I can. On windows three finger swiping between desktops when the task view is open is horrible, but gnome handles it perfectly. I use gnome, mac, and windows daily. They all have pros and cons, but I can't see how anyone could claim Windows or Mac are well ahead of gnome.

fuoqi 6y ago

While I am a long-time Gnome user, I don't think it has a bright future. The project leadership continuously makes weird decision rooted in the believe that Gnome is THE Linux DE and everyone should dance under their flute. It does not help that project is riddled with technical issues (most notably memory leaks), quite inconvenient without installing a number of extensions (which often break from versions to version, no stable extension API, really? JS as the extension language does not help either) and fiddling with settings (e.g. to enable Ctrl+Alt+Left/Right with grid workspace layout). I don't have time to play with different DEs right now, but as soon as I find a suitable replacement, I quite probably will ditch Gnome for good. Unfortunately, Gnome sucks a lot of corporate support, leaving alternative DEs quite dry in that regard, which significantly hinders their pace of development. P.S.: The animated favicon is REALLY f*g annoying.

29athrowaway 6y ago
The decision to not render icons using nautilus anymore, and instead use Gnome shell to render them was an awful decision. The Gnome shell desktop extension is not as robust as nautilus. If you move a file by dragging and dropping a file, there is a good chance that Gnome shell will hang. I disabled the desktop icons extension because of this.
- PuercoPop 6y ago
  In principle it was the right decision. Opening an application shouldn't take over the root window. The was specially obvious for people who don't use gnome but use nautilus. The problem is that as you mention "The Gnome shell desktop extension is not as robust as nautilus"
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    If I have nautilus extensions for different purposes, those won't be available for the desktop because it's managed by the desktop icons extension. It makes the file management experience inconsistent. That is not the case on macOS or Windows.
6y ago

shmerl 6y ago

I wish KDE and Gnome efforts were consolidated - that would have sped up the progress of the Linux desktop, but what can you do. I personally prefer KDE. Stuff like switch to Wayland takes decades because of this split.

war1025 6y ago
> Stuff like switch to Wayland takes decades because of this split. My understanding is the switch to Wayland has taken ages because basically everyone who thought it would be a "quick" thing vastly underestimated the number of stakeholders they would need to get on board with the change and how much work would need to go into making those people consent to switching.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Yeah, Wayland is mostly a regression for my use cases: client-side decorations, breaking screen recording/sharing etc. I know there are theoretical issues with the X security mode, but this replacement is a classic case of “security” producing something that’s basically useless for what people use the software for. Also, because X works over a socket, it’s language-agnostic in a way that a library just can’t be: libraries like CLX allow Common Lisp graphical applications with no dependency on a C library.
  - eitland 6y ago
    > I know there are theoretical issues with the X security mode, but this replacement is a classic case of “security” producing something that’s basically useless for what people use the software for. I keep reminding people that one of the most known models for security is "confidentiality, integrity and availability". If it isn't available your security is still somehow broken however well one scores on confidentiality.
    - canofbars 6y ago
      Wayland security is not broken. Its just a single piece in a much longer term goal that spans many components. Linux was not designed for the current era where users run untrusted and borderline malicious programs regularly. While wayland may secure the desktop, there are 20 other places where programs can scoop up your data. It looks useless now but without every part being fixed individually it will be impossible to create a secure linux desktop that runs proprietary applications.

bigbubba 6y ago

It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails. This correlates with my experience as a Gnome user, as it was Gnome 3 where the project really took on a condescending user-demeaning attitude. Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.' I now tell novices to use XFCE instead.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
Why not KDE? It easily seems like the best Linux DE, and it's so weird that Gnome is so often the default in comparison. As a bonus, all the best Linux apps are Qt-based (e.g., Dolphin [compared to which any other file manager, including Windows's Explorer, will seem unusable], Okular, Gwenview, Clementine, and Kate).
- bigbubba 6y ago
  I used KDE for a while and liked it, but KDE 4.0 burned me and I never looked back. I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. Okular, and gwenview were always nice, even during 4.0 days. Amarok used to be great, though I've not tried Clementine and I'm no longer a user of that sort of music library software. The reason I don't recommend KDE today is because I'm just not very familiar with it.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    > I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. I'm using KDE since 3.5.x including 4.0 release train. Its infinitely better. Stable, fast, extensible and infinitely useful (esp. Dolphin's services). I'm not using too many widgets and/or activities, but it's better than anything I use (incl. macOS, albeit they're close).
  - topspin 6y ago
    It's safe to come back. The bad old days are long past; KDE is a great DE and you should revisit now. Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is an excellent choice and will serve you for many years.
- 6y ago

Avamander 6y ago

``` GNOME has become more conservative, certainly much more so than it was a decade ago in the run-up to GNOME 3. The rationale and phrasing in the announcement of the new versioning scheme (e.g. “Radical technological and design changes are too disruptive for maintainers, users, and developers”) seems indicative of this trend[1]. ``` This is very perceptible in many projects. Quite a few projects are not willing to innovate - use new and better tools, migrate to a new language standard, drop legacy compatibility and so on. Thankfully the nature FOSS allows new forks to emerge and slowly get rid of the dead hand of the past.

rubyn00bie 6y ago

Hmmm, while I have generally been singing nothing but praise for my migration to the Linux desktop. I will, as someone new and lurking around contributing, speak about something that make me hesitant to try and/or turn me off or away. This is only my two-cents as an outsider. I think some of the issues[1] that matter to people have seen no traction over long periods of time and the answer is "it's hard; we'll get to it, leave us alone." And of course, if you look up who these people are, telling you to leave them alone, they are absolutely fucking brilliant people... they certainly know the scope and difficulty. The thing is, these folks are very likely, insanely busy and the longer their lives/careers go on; the less time they'll likely have to devote to seemingly unimportant, to them, but difficult issues. That's life. Zero hate and only thanks to the kind brilliant folks who have spent countless hours donating that brilliance to the world... But then, this poses the big question of: what am I, the less brilliant, to do? What can I do? What other problems require your brilliance or expertise? Lurking through other issues gives me a sense of "not qualified" and I eventually stroll away. Maybe folks, who are qualified and don't realize it, also walk away. I'll very likely contribute to apps using GTK since it's a really nice experience and other parts of the Gnome ecosystem; but I don't know if I'll ever contribute to Gnome proper. [1] I don't particularly want to identify specific issues because I don't think the nice folks who maintain it deserve to be inundated with noise like "fix plz 10yers."

thechao 6y ago
Hey... being smart simplifies some aspects of problem solving, but being smart isn’t necessary to solving problems. One of the better engineers I worked with, while very slow, was extremely thorough. If you had a long-horizon project that had to go at absolutely light speed, you’d set him on the project; two years down the road and the core “inner loops” would be a non-issue. Even Mike Abrash admitted this guy was the absolute pinnacle for this sort of programming.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
Actually, one of the best things you can do to have an impact is to improve a project's communication. Find out what isn't documented and document it. Research issues and get the back-story and architectural decisions. Help people understand each other. Draw out details that might be gumming up someone's attempts to start working on an issue. Help manage and coordinate the work. Discover if old problems are no longer a problem. Find ways to sell something when you are at loggerheads with someone, or find alternate solutions. This is the kind of stuff that gets business projects done in half the time with twice the quality. Nobody has time to do it, but actually it takes almost no technical skill to do; somebody just needs to be hired to do it.

boudewijnrempt 6y ago

All this wibbling about GNOME 3 and so on -- it's just not relevant to the data in the original article. The same thing happened to KDE at the time. The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous. And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012. By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone.

ginko 6y ago
That explains KDE's decline (Nokia owned Qt), but not Gnome.
- boudewijnrempt 6y ago
  Yes, it does, because Nokia had its fingers in both bowls of porridge, to the extent where people like Michael Meeks were fighting really hard to keep a small library like kcalendar out of Maemo. Nokia started with GTK and when they went to Qt, they never stopped their involvement with GTK/GNOME -- they seemed to have expected the idiots in both camps to just work together for the good of free software, and like the idiots we were, we didn't. Good grief, the painful conversations we had after the Dublin MeeGo conf ended, between people from both camps... I was there; I wrote code; I had employees, I went to the various conferences and trade shows. My company provided one of the default apps on the N9...
  - basicneo 6y ago
    What are your thoughts on the Pinephone? What would a reasonable goal for success look like? How can it be achieved? What would cause it to fail?
    - boudewijnrempt 6y ago
      It's not going to replace the enormous investment Nokia made into the free software/linux community... So it won't help the graphs the original article showed. But by another measure, it's already a success since it exists.

spekcular 6y ago

Can someone please tell me what I should use then, if I just want a memory efficient, aesthetically pleasing, no-fuss experience (coming from mac OS)? KDE? It has issues too, but I wonder if they're as severe. Heavily customized GNOME? It's possible, but that's extra work [0]. As much as I love to tweak my i3 config and enjoy trying to be keyboard-only as much as possible, I'm not enough of a poweruser to justify it and the cognitive overhead just slows me down. (I believe Apple came to this conclusion decades ago, too.) I just want to point, click, get work done without bugs or crashes. [0] See e.g. https://gist.github.com/eh8/38fc8240ce4c8fd2e0ae065410045cd5 https://gist.github.com/eh8/38fc8240ce4c8fd2e0ae065410045cd5

zaptheimpaler 6y ago
nothing on Linux comes close to Mac. elementary OS looks pretty good though
- ACow_Adonis 6y ago
  Is this a technical opinion backed up by facts, or merely an aesthetic one? We've got three OS's in our house, and honestly, apart from individually subjective things such as whether and where you want a dock, I don't feel the display manager or aesthetics are inherently any better or worse under my Ubuntu Desktop than Mac OS. Honestly though, I'd say the same for windows 10. The truth is for the last 5 years or so we seem to be yo-yoing around in some local minimum of GUI interfaces. I can't honestly put my hand on my heart and rate any of them over any of the others in terms of user experience.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    I love Ubuntu and it's the only tolerable desktop Linux that let's me get something done instead of constantly fixing the OS and searching for workarounds. But even Ubuntu and Gnome have frequent glitches. They are minor annoyances that I can't even list well. Stuff like an icon would get stuck to the mouse cursor and I have to lock the screen and unlock again to fix it. Or I'd get light text on light background in the context menu. Or the font gets messed up randomly. Or alt tab works weirdly (yes I searched and fiddled with it, it's still not how I expect it). Many more small things. I should make a list but then again, I'm trying to get stuff done, no to compile meticulous bug reports.

diegocg 6y ago

Gnome has historically been written in C (after having played with Obj C and C++, which they didn't like), and while it has adopted other languages like js, large parts of it are still written in C/Glib. I don't find surprising that people don't find writing desktops apps in C attractive. That's in fact why the mono guys tried to make people use C# (previously, Sun had employed quite a lot of desktop people and of course they had pushed for Java, so there were some Java/GTK apps done by them and nobody else). The C# push lasted some years but eventually died because Linux enthusiasts never liked a MS technology that run code in a memory-hungry VM. Then, someone created Vala - a way to get the syntax advantages of a modern language like C#, without depending on a C# runtime. Once again not everybody liked the idea of transpiling a language not used anywhere but in Gnome, so not everybody adopted it, and these days it seems to be mainly popular in the Elementary desktop. Then came the new trend: Javascript. The Gnome people has a strange addiction to following trends, so of course they decided that the future of the Gnome platform was Javascript, the definitive language that everybody will use in the future. It turns out, Javascript's GC didn't play very well with Glib's reference counting, but nobody thought that well before basing the desktop's entire shell on it, so for years the Gnome Shell became a memory hog that would eat hundreds of MB of RAM that would not get freed because of the interaction between the two memory management systems. That lasted until quite recently. Now there are some parts of Gnome pushing for Rust. Fortunately for Gnome, Rust may be good enough to actually become a final destination for them, but even then not many people seem to be using it? Anyway, my point is that in the modern Gnome desktop, you may end up running a Javascript shell running on top of a Glib/GTK core, then some huge C apps like Evolution and Gimp, then others written in Vala or even C# and now Rust. Gnome has been searching for a C replacement for too long, maybe they should stick to one language, and create a really solid platform in order to attract more people instead of switching targets every few years

pjmlp 6y ago
Which is also why in what concerns Xamarin roadmap, macOS, Windows, iOS and Android are what matter, with Linux left for the community.

russellbeattie 6y ago

Ah, 23 years of, "If you don't like it, use something else," and "If you want that feature so badly, like being able to choose a desktop background color, code it yourself. It's open source." It's sort of comforting in a way, the consistency. The Gnome project will always be 80% of what people want in a desktop environment, and 20% screw you.

modzu 6y ago

i just came here to post some love for gnome. linux would be worse without it. of course there are 2001 ways to run linux on the desktop, but in terms of full on desktop environments, that say a user from windows or mac could pick up and use, gnome nails it. i think honestly much of the frustration is that gnome seems to have so much potential, it could be astounding, sometimes seems to be in its own way, but personally my bet is gnome has a long future yet

teunispeters 6y ago

Gnome 3 went the wrong way, pushing for apple aesthetics without apple functionality. I mean on apple, I can launch a console and through every upgrade still get the "same" console back, usually with some scrollback for context. That was lost entirely after gnome 2. I mean that's a "minor" thing but as a developer that cost me wanting to do any further development, which I'd been working on getting into. And then there was needing to run master versions of everything and not distribution versions, which made things amazingly disruptive to work on a computer that also had to do other tasks (eg : job work). This has since gotten reachable if you have really giant hard drives, but that's budget too... anyway the walls were so high then I walked away, and nothing has suggested they've gotten any easier or any more worth climbing. Rule 1 for any UI design team is don't copy Apple. (or if you do, justify it. "because Apple" isn't good enough. Even Apple isn't sticking to this).

kergonath 6y ago
For all this talk about the Mac-ification of GNOME, as a primarily Mac user I absolutely cannot stand Gnome 3. There is nothing Mac-like about it, it is just bland, weird, and terrible. MacOS does not force you to use the Launchpad, for example. The menu bar is still here. The Dock works as it always had. To me one of the worst developments of the Mac UI recently is the disappearance of title bars, but this was a thing in Gnome long before it caught on at Apple. A decently configured KDE or XFCE is much better, and much closer to how a Mac works.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The main issue with Linux desktops is that they can only provide part of the experience, because they don't control the whole stack, so there is no "decently configured" out of the box, neither for users nor for desktop developers. Hence why the two most successful OS based on Linux are using it as an implementation detail for a Web runtime, and a Java/Kotlin runtime, alongside standard ISO C/C++, POSIX subset and some specific OS frameworks. On GNU/Linux the moment someone tries to impose such vertical stacks, a fork lies waiting.
  - 6y ago

jrm4 6y ago

Long time Linux user, not much of a programmer for context, but. Gnome 3 literally shouldn't even be called "Gnome." Probably MATE should. It's not that you have to keep every little thing, sometimes you do have to backwards break; e.g. sure, Python 3 is still Python. But Gnome's model broke so much that it really shouldn't have kept the name.

curlypaul924 6y ago
I feel somewhat the same way, but I also wonder whether the same project with a different name would have been successful.

fartcannon 6y ago

KDE/Plasma for the ex-Windows user, Gnome for the ex-Mac user. It's simple.

wlesieutre 6y ago
If you don't mind a more obscure one, your average Mac user might be into Pantheon from elementaryOS
scns 6y ago
I recommend Cinnamon on Mint for Mac users. It includes Timeshift for backups and other polished tools from the Mint team. They even package chromium as a package themselves instead of shipping a snap (which they removed and replaced by flatpak) [edit: add sentence abuot chromium]

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

I don't get why projects like these don't simply change their design to allow more flexibility and merge into one mega-project. Rather than have Gnome VS KDE fighting it out, why not simply choose one as a base, and hack it up to allow for the other one's functionality? Both teams could then use a shared codebase, and provide tailored customizations of how to run it. I can't imagine that it's impossible to make GNOME work like KDE, or KDE work like GNOME, with some small code tweaks. In other words, if you have two different window systems with two different ways to manage a call to a part of the window... just pick one. Then have the "other team" add any missing functionality. Then give it to the app devs, so the devs can make their apps according to the one standard system, so users can use the one standard system and get on with their lives. How you implement it is trivial technicalities, because, as a user-facing application, the only important thing is the functionality that users want. Getting in the way of what the users want means you don't care about them, and then why should they use your thing?

sergeykish 6y ago
GNOME and KDE are not the only desktop environments on Linux [1]. MATE forked from Gnome 2, much closer than KDE yet they are separate projects. Trinity forked from KDE 3, XFCE is a GTK based project. Imagine same argument for macOS and Windows (if that was possible) — lets merge UI. It would be complete disaster, hated by both camps. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/desktop_environment https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/desktop_environment
- 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
  I would love it if they had the same programmatic interface, but allowed different distributions and customizations of the interface. It doesn't matter how the code works, it matters what the user experience is. So keep the code the same but provide a different user experience if you want. Can you imagine if roads were designed so only specific cars could drive on them, and so in order to have different vehicles, we had to build completely different sets of roads??
  - 6y ago

TheCabin 6y ago

Very interesting article, thanks for sharing the information. FWIW, I used to be very happy with the Gnome environment but 2 recent (nautilus related) changes frustrate me incredibly: * Copy / paste file paths from nautilus to terminal is broken. (You get this extra meta information in the path starting with `x-special/nautilus-clipboard`) * Type ahead is gone. Previously you could type the first letters of a file / folder and select it this way. Now typing automatically triggers a search (equivalent to ctrl+f), which is much slower. These might be minor things but I hit them so often that I was driven away from Gnome.

absove 6y ago
If you don't mind pulling a bunch of cinnamon dependencies along with it, you can use nemo (the cinnamon file manager) as a nautilus replacement in gnome. The search behavior you mentioned in particular is very annoying with nautilus.
- TheCabin 6y ago
  Thanks for the tip. I'll probably give this a shot.

roel_v 6y ago

Oh, Gnome... I was a really into it in the late 1990's. Haven't used it for many years, except the occasional time I set up a Raspberry Pi and plug it into a monitor. For the sake of nostalgia I follwed a few of the links in the post and it took me all of 3 click to find this page (current top post in Gnome Discord) : https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-desktop-icons/4949/13 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-desktop-icons/4949/13 which was a painful reminder of why I gave up on 'Linux on the desktop' and pretty much 'open source for end users' overall.