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I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist history. I can't comment on everything but: > Unity (abandoned) You probably don't recall how bad G

I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist history. I can't comment on everything but: > Unity (abandoned) You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for Gnome 3 to catch up. > snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :). I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist when snap was announced. Or it was around the same time. Given the above two, I'd place very little credence on the rest of your points. I agree with the Mir situation to some extent, but look at how long wayland has taken to ship.

michaelmrose 5y ago
You are absolutely correct that Gnome 3.0 was bad. Even more importantly there isn't anything whatsoever inherently with going your own way. Doing so is ultimately how we end up with a useful marketplace of tools to pick from. If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific sequence of development matters. For what its worth I think they date from around the same time. https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015 The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being universal it will probably never see substantial use outside Ubuntu. It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement. I have a feeling many of these decisions are driven by internal politics than proper analysis. The first question when you decide to go your own way is whether others will find this more useful than the competition. Build better tools is not sufficient if you don’t invest in evangelising and great branding.
mdp2021 5y ago
> You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop manager: the paradigm. Dis-functional effects imposed to the user for no reason. And in a context which replaced functions with minimalism. I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time, I thought it must had been literally a stroke.
- speedybird 5y ago
  > I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time Power users have privilege and need to be hobbled; their complaints ignored. The needs of users with the least privilege, the computer illiterate, should be prioritized. Or something like that.
  - md8z 5y ago
    The general sentiment I see is that if a feature is only used effectively by a small handful of users then it's probably going to risk getting removed. That's just numbers, it doesn't make a difference whether it's "power users" or any other users. Either way maintainer time is limited and sometimes they have to make a decision to drop a feature that isn't pulling its weight. But I've also never heard any description of the phrase "power user" that was clearly defined. Wikipedia says: "A power user is a user of computers ... who uses advanced features" "In enterprise software systems, 'Power User' may be a formal role given to an individual who is not a programmer, but who is a specialist in business software" So which advanced features and which business software are we talking about here? That could be anything really.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      > if a feature is only used effectively by a small handful of users We do automated computing to have tools in general, as we may need them; and we use special features when we need them. Figure imagemagick discriminating options or functions the same way ("Lanczos stays in, but we could ditch Hamming").

michaelmrose 5y ago

You are absolutely correct that Gnome 3.0 was bad. Even more importantly there isn't anything whatsoever inherently with going your own way. Doing so is ultimately how we end up with a useful marketplace of tools to pick from. If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific sequence of development matters. For what its worth I think they date from around the same time. https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015 The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being universal it will probably never see substantial use outside Ubuntu. It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.

rbanffy 5y ago
> It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement. I have a feeling many of these decisions are driven by internal politics than proper analysis. The first question when you decide to go your own way is whether others will find this more useful than the competition. Build better tools is not sufficient if you don’t invest in evangelising and great branding.

mdp2021 5y ago

> You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop manager: the paradigm. Dis-functional effects imposed to the user for no reason. And in a context which replaced functions with minimalism. I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time, I thought it must had been literally a stroke.

speedybird 5y ago
> I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time Power users have privilege and need to be hobbled; their complaints ignored. The needs of users with the least privilege, the computer illiterate, should be prioritized. Or something like that.
- md8z 5y ago
  The general sentiment I see is that if a feature is only used effectively by a small handful of users then it's probably going to risk getting removed. That's just numbers, it doesn't make a difference whether it's "power users" or any other users. Either way maintainer time is limited and sometimes they have to make a decision to drop a feature that isn't pulling its weight. But I've also never heard any description of the phrase "power user" that was clearly defined. Wikipedia says: "A power user is a user of computers ... who uses advanced features" "In enterprise software systems, 'Power User' may be a formal role given to an individual who is not a programmer, but who is a specialist in business software" So which advanced features and which business software are we talking about here? That could be anything really.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    > if a feature is only used effectively by a small handful of users We do automated computing to have tools in general, as we may need them; and we use special features when we need them. Figure imagemagick discriminating options or functions the same way ("Lanczos stays in, but we could ditch Hamming").