8 ms·

Next Steps for the GNOME Foundation

80 points by JNRowe 5y ago

SilverRed 5y ago
Reminder that gnome has a donations page: https://www.gnome.org/donate/ https://www.gnome.org/donate/ I'll be donating today because gnome has been my favorite DE for the last few years and the changes they made to gnome 40 are awesome.
- rtpg 5y ago
  same, setting up a recurring donation. I have a lot of qualms about a lot of stuff, but I feel like there is a lot of great payoff for GNOME to continue being able to maintain/improve stuff, especially as its my daily driver. (I know this is anathema to a lot of people but I would gladly support something like Canonical having an OSS fund that it pushed patreon-style on its desktop OS, though to be honest I don't know what the admin costs for something like that would be)
- prvc 5y ago
  I will not be donating for the foreseeable future, because Gnome has repeatedly shown contempt towards their software's userbase by ignoring their feedback and releasing software that has poor quality and usability.
  - hexa22 5y ago
    The gnome devs have built something almost exactly how I want. If the gnome devs listened to most of the feedback I see on HN, I would no longer like the DE. Consider that different users have different preferences. I have tried almost all of the DE/WMs and have found gnome to be the most stable/best looking/best defaults.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      I have the same feeling that you do. But for some reason some stuff has been broken on GNOME that did not require breaking. My three biggest pain points (both personally and for the non-tech people i provide tech support with) is alt-tab not switching between all open window in recent order usage, the disappearance of the venerable systray, and .desktop files not proposing to be executed (at least on Debian). These three points are contrary to every other desktop environment there is, and it's confusing the hell out of people. I really wish GNOME the best and i really like some aspects of it (it's pretty and it's well-integrated) but over the years they've dumped core features like this, and made the overall experience super slow. If you've tried to run GNOME on second-hand hardware with HDD (not SSD) you know what i'm talking about.
  - berkes 5y ago
    A good reasoning. But rather negative in tone of voice. Gnome is not for you; good! Because there's lot's of choice: POPos, Mint, KDE, LXDE, iwm, and so forth and so on. This is what OSS en Linux is all about: choices! freedom! Why not use one of the alternatives that fits your requirements better and praise that alternative?
    - approxim8ion 5y ago
      Clarification: At least until the next release, PopOS is still very much GNOME.
      - berkes 5y ago
        Certainly. As is Mint, IIRC. But those may solve grandparents' issue with "ignoring their feedback" or "poor quality and usability.".
        dralley 5y ago
        No, cinnamon is a fork of gnome but it's a heavy fork that has been diverged for a decade now. It's not really gnome anymore.
    - prvc 5y ago
      I think you are saying that only positive feedback is acceptable? If this is the case, I disagree. As for "just go make your own/ use your own", well, many people do. Personally I do use a different WM when I can, but still have to use GNOME from time to time.
  - jamespo 5y ago
    What projects do you donate to?
- gautamcgoel 5y ago
  Can you expand on what you like about Gnome 40? I recently upgraded to Fedora 34 and hence have Gnome 40 installed, but I haven't really explored much.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    It might sound a little silly but in the expanded mode where all windows are shown, the desktop wallpapers have a huge border radius on them and it makes me happy every time I see it. I have also had non GNOME using coworkers comment on this detail as well as how the windows sit slightly outside of the wallpaper in this mode. I also remember seeing a number of minor UI tweaks around the place but I have forgotten which ones as they just look normal now.
Cloudef 5y ago
Maybe they finally support server side decorations
- Bancakes 5y ago
  Or a way to turn off vsynch/change the compositor. I've found nvidia drivers have their own vsynch, and gnome adds some on top of it, netting a microstuttery experience. May be wrong, but I find xfce without compositing to perform better.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Gnome has non-smooth animations on Intel GPU as well. It does not bother me too much, but it would be nice to have 60 FPS for simple animations like opening/closing activities.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      They continue to improve on it and it is actually smooth when I have like 2 windows open, but it stutters with more. Not sure why is that, plasma always felt buttery smooth compared to that. It is fancy to blame everything on js, but perhaps the animation is indeed initialized inside js?
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        I've noticed GNOME is way snappier on a SSD than a HDD. But of course i'll join you in blaming JS for all the slowness and memory leaks of GNOME ;)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
johnchristopher 5y ago
OT: what a jump in time this is https://ramcq.net/2005/03/ https://ramcq.net/2005/03/ Interesting really to read and see how some things have changed and others not.
- enriquto 5y ago
  Is this the correct link? It does not seem to do anything with gnome.
  - jacobmischka 5y ago
    They claimed it was off-topic. It's a link to the same blog in 2005, they were just interested by the glimpse into the past.
aaronbrethorst 5y ago
You can find a link to their IRS filings here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/43572618 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/435...
jordigh 5y ago
Hm, no mention of free software? Just open source? I know it's the same software, but the way it's referred to gives me pause.
- opheliate 5y ago
  > The goal is to find projects and funding that allow us to both invest in the GNOME community and find new ways for FOSS to benefit people who aren’t already in our community. The statement of their specific goal for the future refers to FOSS.
- ludston 5y ago
  Given that the mission statement of Gnome is explicitly "to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software." I'm not sure why it would.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  Yeah, the whole article reads very...coroprate-y. I'm not sure if I'm happy with it, but I haven't used Gnome in multiple years, so my opinion doesn't really matter here. I do however, wish that Gnome foundation remains healthy. Having competition is always good, even in FLOSS.
- hexa22 5y ago
  Open source as defined by the OSI is literally identical to free software as defined by the FSF. And no, open source does not include things like unreal engine which you can view the source but not use freely. This is called Source Available software.
kaba0 5y ago
I would like to see a focus on making linux desktops secure. Just because we are usually running non-evil code, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t process evil data that can easily exploit the numerous bugs (especially with the everything in C mentality) found in open-source software. And frankly, flatpak is not a good direction (especially written in C), it is no solution to the dependency hell problem, nor to proper sandboxing. A new userspace should be built similar to Android with proper capability-based sandboxes.
- berkes 5y ago
  Slightly joking: https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR (EDIT: I'd not propose to actually rewrite existing infra in Rust, but at least flatpack 3.0 or whatever the next version would be, would benefit from this)
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  The android design from a usability perspective is garbage that has been made over with enough money and effort to be semi acceptable in the same fashion as a garbage truck would be able to fly if you attached enough rockets to it. If the Linux desktop started with a design just as good I don't think I would live long enough to see it rendered acceptable.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Still better than not having any sort of security… But I agree that ios has it better.
    - swiley 5y ago
      Yeah I'll happily take "not any sort of security" Debian over the android situation any day of the week.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- 5y ago
mlang23 5y ago
Before the CORBA->DBus rewrite, the AT-SPI and related projects (read: the GNOME Accessibility infrastructure) was really looking promising. The Sun Accessibility office did great work to make GNOME a useable platform for people with disabilities and developers working on accessibility. The sudden death of the sun accessibility office combined with a big rewrite of the communication infrastructure pretty much set us back for some years. GNOME Accessibility is short on developer staff really actively working on the topic, and those which have managed to persist over the years are almost burnt out. When GNOME is apparently growing right now, it would be great to divert some of the new resources towards more accessibility development. When GNOME started to support accessibility back around 2003, it was leading the way. It was the first toolkit to do so on FLOSS platforms, and this was even before commercial vendors have started to include accessibility by default. These days, all commercial vendors of desktop and mobile OSes have accessibility built-in by default. Which shows that GNOME was on the right track starting early. It would be great if management could acknowledge that this is an important topic which needs more work to achieve excellent results.
- berkes 5y ago
  Diverting funds and attention into "Accessibility infrastructure", sounds like it fits very well with what Robert McQueen explains to be an important goal of GNOME foundation: > try to do more in the world and bring the benefits of GNOME to more people. We want to take our message of trusted, affordable and accessible computing to the wider world.
einpoklum 5y ago
Next steps? How about: 1. Break GNOME's hard dependency on systemd. I don't mean refuse to use it, just don't force people to have to do so. 2. Fix that damn file picker dialog we've been groaning about for 20 years. Specifically, put the full path in an editable textbox. I'm not kidding! This step alone would be sooo much of a usability improvement for me! I don't mind if you guys take a year-long hiatus and just do those two things.
- viraptor 5y ago
  Doesn't Ubuntu's logind shim solve the first point already?
  - tremon 5y ago
    I'd say that shim and elogind are third-party workarounds. The type of kludge you usually only need for proprietary software.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    Not as far as I am aware. I'm not 100% familiar with the nitty-gritty of this, but it forced the Devuan folks to fork Debian rather than just remove some packages and install others. Obviously if the solution did not require altering the source code of some of the existing packages (including GNOME ones AFAICR) - nobody would have gone and forked a distro.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      They need to repackage at least the user and system service packages which in Debian now carry .service files rather than other init configuration.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Since the decision made by Debian was that systemd will be the only supported init system, they had to fork to maintain alternative versions of packages depending on the init system, so I don’t think it’s fair to say it is on GNOME.
cryptos 5y ago
Improving UX, including usability testing with actual users, should be a top priority. Today Gnome has some pointless mobile-device-like UI concepts that don't make much sense on a desktop (like "swipe" away the start screen to be able to log-in). Then there are way too much ridicoulus limitation in the UI. In certain aspects Gnome was better 10 years ago.
- kaba0 5y ago
  That “swipe” will happen just by starting typing/pressing any button — so I think it is exactly a good example of convergent UX. It is exactly my gripe with windows where you have to separately press one key just so to make the locker locker disappear.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > That “swipe” will happen just by starting typing/pressing any button True. But people usually don't KNOW that. It would help if it was written out. "Swipe to unlock or type your password" is less confusing than a weird arrow-like animation going up.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Yeah, or even add a conditional to not even mention touch on a non-touch capable device.
  - cryptos 5y ago
    But the whole first screen is pointless. Why not show the log-in prompt directly on the first screen? This is counter intuitive and an example of "function follows form" (and not the other way around).
    - kaba0 5y ago
      I quite like it. It’s function is to showcase a large clock and notifications, similarly to how it is on phones. I don’t necessarily want to unlock it when it’s visible, but when I want it will seamlessly disappear.
ramboldio 5y ago
The GNOME Project manged to finally do away with the prejudice that Open Source means bad UX. Great job!
- southerntofu 5y ago
  In the specific case of my mom and a few other neighbors, it's the KDE project that did just that, well over a decade ago. But i agree with your point that GNOME design is really nice.
rtpg 5y ago
I had a bad feeling the comments section would be filled with dorky, off-base rerun complaints and whining about UX and the "oh it's all mobile design" tropes that has barely been true for years. Imagine anyone working on GNOME stuff reading this! There have been leaps and strides in making Gnome stuff stable and work out of the box. I remember using Linux 5 or so years ago, and if I wanted to do GUI configuration of X/Y/Z, almost all the time it was some random app that someone just uploads to sourcefourge, with random likelihood of working. Now I have basically all the coverage I need just from out of the box Gnome stuff (I'd love for pavu-control to get brought in but...) So much stuff just works. Someone needs to do an indiegogo about the file picker, but it _also_ basically works, and the design of gnome stuff in general has transitioned well to widescreen monitors etc. Not to mention insanely neat stuff like the Gnome Builder [0], even if that doesn't affect my day-to-day. Y'all are ungrateful, and really discounting how well stuff works now compared to how it used to (Yes, even in Gnome 2!). Gnome's been great to me [0]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder
- brnt 5y ago
  I do not recognize any of the difficulties you mention. I was a Gnome 2 user since 2.4, 2.6, right up until the end. Around 2.10 things stabilized, wel before 2010. I loved it, and I still like Gnome 2's fork. I tried to like 3, but unfortunately I don't see how the mobile-criticism isn't valid, or how it made things easier or better. I wasn't and am not someone who tweaks and tunes, but Gnome 3 was too much simplification, for me. I can imagine it's tough to read if you're a Gnome committer, but I would hope the points raised are seen (although evidence seems to indicate it isn't), not the fact that there is criticism. The way I see it, Gnome now is a bit of an anti-gui: it seems to be in retreat of actually providing GUI for doing things. This may be what some people want, mobile guis are the same (and I protest that too), but whereas before I had the impression Gnome was big enough to suit different sorts, now it seems those who don't like the narrower goal Gnome has set for itself just need to move on. And I have, in a great reversal of history, KDE actually feels like the modern Gnome 2 that never was (I disliked KDE 3 and 4 with a passion). I don't think modern Gnome is the right DE to be the default in nearly every distro, because it has become so opinionated. There are other DEs that to me seem better suited to that role. Then again, I couldn't tell you why Android-iOS (I barely see any difference) is what it is, so maybe I'm just old, different or some sort of UI-minority.
op03 5y ago
I submitted a few patches but got turned of having to deal with Vala and C. Tooling and docs feel ancient compared to whats available in .Net/Java/js etc. Thats said I really admire how ambitious they tried to be and all the stuff they have managed to produce with such few resources.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

80 points by JNRowe 5y ago

Reminder that gnome has a donations page: https://www.gnome.org/donate/ https://www.gnome.org/donate/ I'll be donating today because gnome has been my favorite DE for the last few years and the changes they made to gnome 40 are awesome.

rtpg 5y ago
same, setting up a recurring donation. I have a lot of qualms about a lot of stuff, but I feel like there is a lot of great payoff for GNOME to continue being able to maintain/improve stuff, especially as its my daily driver. (I know this is anathema to a lot of people but I would gladly support something like Canonical having an OSS fund that it pushed patreon-style on its desktop OS, though to be honest I don't know what the admin costs for something like that would be)
prvc 5y ago
I will not be donating for the foreseeable future, because Gnome has repeatedly shown contempt towards their software's userbase by ignoring their feedback and releasing software that has poor quality and usability.
- hexa22 5y ago
  The gnome devs have built something almost exactly how I want. If the gnome devs listened to most of the feedback I see on HN, I would no longer like the DE. Consider that different users have different preferences. I have tried almost all of the DE/WMs and have found gnome to be the most stable/best looking/best defaults.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    I have the same feeling that you do. But for some reason some stuff has been broken on GNOME that did not require breaking. My three biggest pain points (both personally and for the non-tech people i provide tech support with) is alt-tab not switching between all open window in recent order usage, the disappearance of the venerable systray, and .desktop files not proposing to be executed (at least on Debian). These three points are contrary to every other desktop environment there is, and it's confusing the hell out of people. I really wish GNOME the best and i really like some aspects of it (it's pretty and it's well-integrated) but over the years they've dumped core features like this, and made the overall experience super slow. If you've tried to run GNOME on second-hand hardware with HDD (not SSD) you know what i'm talking about.
- berkes 5y ago
  A good reasoning. But rather negative in tone of voice. Gnome is not for you; good! Because there's lot's of choice: POPos, Mint, KDE, LXDE, iwm, and so forth and so on. This is what OSS en Linux is all about: choices! freedom! Why not use one of the alternatives that fits your requirements better and praise that alternative?
  - approxim8ion 5y ago
    Clarification: At least until the next release, PopOS is still very much GNOME.
    - berkes 5y ago
      Certainly. As is Mint, IIRC. But those may solve grandparents' issue with "ignoring their feedback" or "poor quality and usability.".
      - dralley 5y ago
        No, cinnamon is a fork of gnome but it's a heavy fork that has been diverged for a decade now. It's not really gnome anymore.
  - prvc 5y ago
    I think you are saying that only positive feedback is acceptable? If this is the case, I disagree. As for "just go make your own/ use your own", well, many people do. Personally I do use a different WM when I can, but still have to use GNOME from time to time.
- jamespo 5y ago
  What projects do you donate to?
gautamcgoel 5y ago
Can you expand on what you like about Gnome 40? I recently upgraded to Fedora 34 and hence have Gnome 40 installed, but I haven't really explored much.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  It might sound a little silly but in the expanded mode where all windows are shown, the desktop wallpapers have a huge border radius on them and it makes me happy every time I see it. I have also had non GNOME using coworkers comment on this detail as well as how the windows sit slightly outside of the wallpaper in this mode. I also remember seeing a number of minor UI tweaks around the place but I have forgotten which ones as they just look normal now.

Cloudef 5y ago

Maybe they finally support server side decorations

Bancakes 5y ago
Or a way to turn off vsynch/change the compositor. I've found nvidia drivers have their own vsynch, and gnome adds some on top of it, netting a microstuttery experience. May be wrong, but I find xfce without compositing to perform better.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Gnome has non-smooth animations on Intel GPU as well. It does not bother me too much, but it would be nice to have 60 FPS for simple animations like opening/closing activities.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    They continue to improve on it and it is actually smooth when I have like 2 windows open, but it stutters with more. Not sure why is that, plasma always felt buttery smooth compared to that. It is fancy to blame everything on js, but perhaps the animation is indeed initialized inside js?
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      I've noticed GNOME is way snappier on a SSD than a HDD. But of course i'll join you in blaming JS for all the slowness and memory leaks of GNOME ;)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

johnchristopher 5y ago

OT: what a jump in time this is https://ramcq.net/2005/03/ https://ramcq.net/2005/03/ Interesting really to read and see how some things have changed and others not.

enriquto 5y ago
Is this the correct link? It does not seem to do anything with gnome.
- jacobmischka 5y ago
  They claimed it was off-topic. It's a link to the same blog in 2005, they were just interested by the glimpse into the past.

aaronbrethorst 5y ago

You can find a link to their IRS filings here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/43572618 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/435...

jordigh 5y ago

Hm, no mention of free software? Just open source? I know it's the same software, but the way it's referred to gives me pause.

opheliate 5y ago
> The goal is to find projects and funding that allow us to both invest in the GNOME community and find new ways for FOSS to benefit people who aren’t already in our community. The statement of their specific goal for the future refers to FOSS.
ludston 5y ago
Given that the mission statement of Gnome is explicitly "to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software." I'm not sure why it would.
e3bc54b2 5y ago
Yeah, the whole article reads very...coroprate-y. I'm not sure if I'm happy with it, but I haven't used Gnome in multiple years, so my opinion doesn't really matter here. I do however, wish that Gnome foundation remains healthy. Having competition is always good, even in FLOSS.
hexa22 5y ago
Open source as defined by the OSI is literally identical to free software as defined by the FSF. And no, open source does not include things like unreal engine which you can view the source but not use freely. This is called Source Available software.

kaba0 5y ago

I would like to see a focus on making linux desktops secure. Just because we are usually running non-evil code, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t process evil data that can easily exploit the numerous bugs (especially with the everything in C mentality) found in open-source software. And frankly, flatpak is not a good direction (especially written in C), it is no solution to the dependency hell problem, nor to proper sandboxing. A new userspace should be built similar to Android with proper capability-based sandboxes.

berkes 5y ago
Slightly joking: https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR (EDIT: I'd not propose to actually rewrite existing infra in Rust, but at least flatpack 3.0 or whatever the next version would be, would benefit from this)
michaelmrose 5y ago
The android design from a usability perspective is garbage that has been made over with enough money and effort to be semi acceptable in the same fashion as a garbage truck would be able to fly if you attached enough rockets to it. If the Linux desktop started with a design just as good I don't think I would live long enough to see it rendered acceptable.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Still better than not having any sort of security… But I agree that ios has it better.
  - swiley 5y ago
    Yeah I'll happily take "not any sort of security" Debian over the android situation any day of the week.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
5y ago

mlang23 5y ago

Before the CORBA->DBus rewrite, the AT-SPI and related projects (read: the GNOME Accessibility infrastructure) was really looking promising. The Sun Accessibility office did great work to make GNOME a useable platform for people with disabilities and developers working on accessibility. The sudden death of the sun accessibility office combined with a big rewrite of the communication infrastructure pretty much set us back for some years. GNOME Accessibility is short on developer staff really actively working on the topic, and those which have managed to persist over the years are almost burnt out. When GNOME is apparently growing right now, it would be great to divert some of the new resources towards more accessibility development. When GNOME started to support accessibility back around 2003, it was leading the way. It was the first toolkit to do so on FLOSS platforms, and this was even before commercial vendors have started to include accessibility by default. These days, all commercial vendors of desktop and mobile OSes have accessibility built-in by default. Which shows that GNOME was on the right track starting early. It would be great if management could acknowledge that this is an important topic which needs more work to achieve excellent results.

berkes 5y ago
Diverting funds and attention into "Accessibility infrastructure", sounds like it fits very well with what Robert McQueen explains to be an important goal of GNOME foundation: > try to do more in the world and bring the benefits of GNOME to more people. We want to take our message of trusted, affordable and accessible computing to the wider world.

einpoklum 5y ago

Next steps? How about: 1. Break GNOME's hard dependency on systemd. I don't mean refuse to use it, just don't force people to have to do so. 2. Fix that damn file picker dialog we've been groaning about for 20 years. Specifically, put the full path in an editable textbox. I'm not kidding! This step alone would be sooo much of a usability improvement for me! I don't mind if you guys take a year-long hiatus and just do those two things.

viraptor 5y ago
Doesn't Ubuntu's logind shim solve the first point already?
- tremon 5y ago
  I'd say that shim and elogind are third-party workarounds. The type of kludge you usually only need for proprietary software.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Not as far as I am aware. I'm not 100% familiar with the nitty-gritty of this, but it forced the Devuan folks to fork Debian rather than just remove some packages and install others. Obviously if the solution did not require altering the source code of some of the existing packages (including GNOME ones AFAICR) - nobody would have gone and forked a distro.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    They need to repackage at least the user and system service packages which in Debian now carry .service files rather than other init configuration.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Since the decision made by Debian was that systemd will be the only supported init system, they had to fork to maintain alternative versions of packages depending on the init system, so I don’t think it’s fair to say it is on GNOME.

cryptos 5y ago

Improving UX, including usability testing with actual users, should be a top priority. Today Gnome has some pointless mobile-device-like UI concepts that don't make much sense on a desktop (like "swipe" away the start screen to be able to log-in). Then there are way too much ridicoulus limitation in the UI. In certain aspects Gnome was better 10 years ago.

kaba0 5y ago
That “swipe” will happen just by starting typing/pressing any button — so I think it is exactly a good example of convergent UX. It is exactly my gripe with windows where you have to separately press one key just so to make the locker locker disappear.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > That “swipe” will happen just by starting typing/pressing any button True. But people usually don't KNOW that. It would help if it was written out. "Swipe to unlock or type your password" is less confusing than a weird arrow-like animation going up.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Yeah, or even add a conditional to not even mention touch on a non-touch capable device.
- cryptos 5y ago
  But the whole first screen is pointless. Why not show the log-in prompt directly on the first screen? This is counter intuitive and an example of "function follows form" (and not the other way around).
  - kaba0 5y ago
    I quite like it. It’s function is to showcase a large clock and notifications, similarly to how it is on phones. I don’t necessarily want to unlock it when it’s visible, but when I want it will seamlessly disappear.

ramboldio 5y ago

The GNOME Project manged to finally do away with the prejudice that Open Source means bad UX. Great job!

southerntofu 5y ago
In the specific case of my mom and a few other neighbors, it's the KDE project that did just that, well over a decade ago. But i agree with your point that GNOME design is really nice.

rtpg 5y ago

I had a bad feeling the comments section would be filled with dorky, off-base rerun complaints and whining about UX and the "oh it's all mobile design" tropes that has barely been true for years. Imagine anyone working on GNOME stuff reading this! There have been leaps and strides in making Gnome stuff stable and work out of the box. I remember using Linux 5 or so years ago, and if I wanted to do GUI configuration of X/Y/Z, almost all the time it was some random app that someone just uploads to sourcefourge, with random likelihood of working. Now I have basically all the coverage I need just from out of the box Gnome stuff (I'd love for pavu-control to get brought in but...) So much stuff just works. Someone needs to do an indiegogo about the file picker, but it _also_ basically works, and the design of gnome stuff in general has transitioned well to widescreen monitors etc. Not to mention insanely neat stuff like the Gnome Builder [0], even if that doesn't affect my day-to-day. Y'all are ungrateful, and really discounting how well stuff works now compared to how it used to (Yes, even in Gnome 2!). Gnome's been great to me [0]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder

brnt 5y ago
I do not recognize any of the difficulties you mention. I was a Gnome 2 user since 2.4, 2.6, right up until the end. Around 2.10 things stabilized, wel before 2010. I loved it, and I still like Gnome 2's fork. I tried to like 3, but unfortunately I don't see how the mobile-criticism isn't valid, or how it made things easier or better. I wasn't and am not someone who tweaks and tunes, but Gnome 3 was too much simplification, for me. I can imagine it's tough to read if you're a Gnome committer, but I would hope the points raised are seen (although evidence seems to indicate it isn't), not the fact that there is criticism. The way I see it, Gnome now is a bit of an anti-gui: it seems to be in retreat of actually providing GUI for doing things. This may be what some people want, mobile guis are the same (and I protest that too), but whereas before I had the impression Gnome was big enough to suit different sorts, now it seems those who don't like the narrower goal Gnome has set for itself just need to move on. And I have, in a great reversal of history, KDE actually feels like the modern Gnome 2 that never was (I disliked KDE 3 and 4 with a passion). I don't think modern Gnome is the right DE to be the default in nearly every distro, because it has become so opinionated. There are other DEs that to me seem better suited to that role. Then again, I couldn't tell you why Android-iOS (I barely see any difference) is what it is, so maybe I'm just old, different or some sort of UI-minority.

op03 5y ago

I submitted a few patches but got turned of having to deal with Vala and C. Tooling and docs feel ancient compared to whats available in .Net/Java/js etc. Thats said I really admire how ambitious they tried to be and all the stuff they have managed to produce with such few resources.

deleted 5y ago
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