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But why does the world always go along with it? In an alternate universe, the community just said "yeah, no thanks, I'll keep using Gnome 2", which they continu

But why does the world always go along with it? In an alternate universe, the community just said "yeah, no thanks, I'll keep using Gnome 2", which they continued maintaining under the name Elf or whatever.

pfranz 4y ago
I think that's where the fracturing comes in. For whatever reason, distros will ship with the new thing. The past 2 or 3 places I've worked adopted MATE (a continuation of GNOME 2). And, of course, there was instability at these places in figuring out which direction to go.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > The past 2 or 3 places I've worked adopted MATE (a continuation of GNOME 2). Oh, so it did happen, I’m not currently a Linux user and had no idea!
- frostwarrior 4y ago
  > For whatever reason, distros will ship with the new thing. Chicken and egg problem: Popular distros will follow popular DE's, because they have the most people making their way out of bugs and problems. MATE, on the other hand, is kinda barren compared to more popular options. Even if it's the same old Gnome2 desktop of yore
jrumbut 4y ago
They did! MATE is fairly popular, but as to why it happens I think it's about people. There are only so many people willing (and able) to do the often difficult and unglamorous programming work that goes into maintaining something like Gnome. If you're working on a major distro you have a certain level of trust in Gnome 3 because the same people delivered and supported Gnome 2. I'm sure when Gnome 3's direction became clear dozens or hundreds said "no way! I'm going to start my own fork which will never change!" But how do you know which one to pick?
- eimrine 4y ago
  Mate gives me a warm feeling of being at home where all is totally understandable and nothing has changed since 10+ years ago when Gnome 2 was a king.
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  The sad part is that Gnome 2 had a whole ecosystem of third party software that integrated with it. Just a few of that got ported over to Mate (usually just s/GNOME/MATE/g) but it never gained the same traction.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    Why did it need to be ported at all? Shouldn't it "just work"?
    - pantalaimon 4y ago
      Mate had to change all “Gnome” strings to “Mate” so both could be packaged/installed in parallel and probably also for legal reasons. This means all DBus interfaces need to use the new name, a nautilus plugin must now call caja functions instead and so on.
      - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
        ...huh, well that's frustrating! Could this be solved with a basic compatibility layer?
        mycall 4y ago
        or decompile, touch strings, then recompile.

pfranz 4y ago

I think that's where the fracturing comes in. For whatever reason, distros will ship with the new thing. The past 2 or 3 places I've worked adopted MATE (a continuation of GNOME 2). And, of course, there was instability at these places in figuring out which direction to go.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> The past 2 or 3 places I've worked adopted MATE (a continuation of GNOME 2). Oh, so it did happen, I’m not currently a Linux user and had no idea!
frostwarrior 4y ago
> For whatever reason, distros will ship with the new thing. Chicken and egg problem: Popular distros will follow popular DE's, because they have the most people making their way out of bugs and problems. MATE, on the other hand, is kinda barren compared to more popular options. Even if it's the same old Gnome2 desktop of yore

jrumbut 4y ago

They did! MATE is fairly popular, but as to why it happens I think it's about people. There are only so many people willing (and able) to do the often difficult and unglamorous programming work that goes into maintaining something like Gnome. If you're working on a major distro you have a certain level of trust in Gnome 3 because the same people delivered and supported Gnome 2. I'm sure when Gnome 3's direction became clear dozens or hundreds said "no way! I'm going to start my own fork which will never change!" But how do you know which one to pick?

eimrine 4y ago
Mate gives me a warm feeling of being at home where all is totally understandable and nothing has changed since 10+ years ago when Gnome 2 was a king.
pantalaimon 4y ago
The sad part is that Gnome 2 had a whole ecosystem of third party software that integrated with it. Just a few of that got ported over to Mate (usually just s/GNOME/MATE/g) but it never gained the same traction.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Why did it need to be ported at all? Shouldn't it "just work"?
  - pantalaimon 4y ago
    Mate had to change all “Gnome” strings to “Mate” so both could be packaged/installed in parallel and probably also for legal reasons. This means all DBus interfaces need to use the new name, a nautilus plugin must now call caja functions instead and so on.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      ...huh, well that's frustrating! Could this be solved with a basic compatibility layer?
      - mycall 4y ago
        or decompile, touch strings, then recompile.