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> It's core qualities (low resource usage, balance between customization power & approachability, and more importantly familiarity) disappeared. I think you hi

> It's core qualities (low resource usage, balance between customization power & approachability, and more importantly familiarity) disappeared. I think you hit the nail on the head. KDE gave you the full DE experience, but there was that pesky Qt license. GNOME was full GPL/LGPL and it felt like it was built to attract power users. Skins were at the height of their popularity (remember Winamp?), and GNOME gave users an easy way to customize everything without having to muck with some arcane config file format. Every release felt closer to some platonic ideal of a fully customizable yet easy-to-use DE. Then came the iPhone, and suddenly the world went hyper-modern and hyper-minimal. Restaurants names like "The Heavenly Chicken" are now old-fashioned; today the same restaurant is simply "chicken". GNOME was also affected by this cultural shift, and as you point out, ended up abandoning its core qualities. I believe that hyper-modernism, like other movements, is just a fad, and in a few years we will "rediscover" modding. Everything will be customizable, from the color of your keyboard to the genes that control your eye color. Who knows, we might even shake the dust off the blink tag.

bayindirh 6y ago
GNOME left in the middle of a perfect storm IMHO. I remember GTK being much faster and lighter than Qt/KDE and boasting this fact with blog posts with performance metrics. These years also were problematic for Linux on laptops. Power management, wireless and overall experience was very bad. MacBook had a considerable mind and market share among Linux developers. I remember a slide saying "Linux on desktop cannot move forward because of MacOS's advantages and features on mobile", which was very true for that day. With the rise of Ubuntu, iPhone and MacOS, GNOME wanted to be the MacOS of Linux. Straightforward, minimal and somewhat capable. However, leaning heavily on GConf, burial of features, dumbing down of UI marked their downfall. I've moved to KDE before that time and was spoiled by kio, integrated DE features and other stuff. 4.0 was rough but, I endured and KDE became something different. A class by itself. The so-called Qt Agreement and dual-licensing also saved them. I also believe that customization will return. I wish GNOME best of luck and give me some reason to try them, at least in a VM. I won't change my primary DE, but I'll play with others at least. GTK has some nice qualities but, GNOME3 is not treating its foundations and features as it should IMHO. I can still dig my .kde folder and look what are the settings and how things configured though. GNOME, while being the flagship DE of GNU movement, feels closed, bloated and devoid of any GNU/Linux spirit. Maybe that's the aim for mass market adoption. I don't know. --- Addendum: I want to add that initial GNOME3 and GTK3 documentation was horrible. They moved everything to JS based introspection stuff and generated documentation automatically with no explanation whatsoever. We've tried to develop a gigantic project with GNOME3 and the best way to develop software was via trial'n'error in their new and shiny developer console. It was like being insulted continuously while walking in the dark in a room full of Lego bricks on the floor and sharp corners at head level. To add insult to injury, their touch implementation was buggy. I dug the WM implementation for two weeks and found a comment basically saying that "We hacked this together. It's not X protocol compliant & needs to be re-implemented from ground up. Since you've found here, maybe you can do that, thanks." Grr... However, the WM code was very clean and readable. I'll give them that.

bayindirh 6y ago

GNOME left in the middle of a perfect storm IMHO. I remember GTK being much faster and lighter than Qt/KDE and boasting this fact with blog posts with performance metrics. These years also were problematic for Linux on laptops. Power management, wireless and overall experience was very bad. MacBook had a considerable mind and market share among Linux developers. I remember a slide saying "Linux on desktop cannot move forward because of MacOS's advantages and features on mobile", which was very true for that day. With the rise of Ubuntu, iPhone and MacOS, GNOME wanted to be the MacOS of Linux. Straightforward, minimal and somewhat capable. However, leaning heavily on GConf, burial of features, dumbing down of UI marked their downfall. I've moved to KDE before that time and was spoiled by kio, integrated DE features and other stuff. 4.0 was rough but, I endured and KDE became something different. A class by itself. The so-called Qt Agreement and dual-licensing also saved them. I also believe that customization will return. I wish GNOME best of luck and give me some reason to try them, at least in a VM. I won't change my primary DE, but I'll play with others at least. GTK has some nice qualities but, GNOME3 is not treating its foundations and features as it should IMHO. I can still dig my .kde folder and look what are the settings and how things configured though. GNOME, while being the flagship DE of GNU movement, feels closed, bloated and devoid of any GNU/Linux spirit. Maybe that's the aim for mass market adoption. I don't know. --- Addendum: I want to add that initial GNOME3 and GTK3 documentation was horrible. They moved everything to JS based introspection stuff and generated documentation automatically with no explanation whatsoever. We've tried to develop a gigantic project with GNOME3 and the best way to develop software was via trial'n'error in their new and shiny developer console. It was like being insulted continuously while walking in the dark in a room full of Lego bricks on the floor and sharp corners at head level. To add insult to injury, their touch implementation was buggy. I dug the WM implementation for two weeks and found a comment basically saying that "We hacked this together. It's not X protocol compliant & needs to be re-implemented from ground up. Since you've found here, maybe you can do that, thanks." Grr... However, the WM code was very clean and readable. I'll give them that.