9 ms·

1. As the author says toward the end of the article, I think the biggest problem with Gnome nowadays is that only a small number of people actually use it on a

by kijin 14y ago

1. As the author says toward the end of the article, I think the biggest problem with Gnome nowadays is that only a small number of people actually use it on a day-to-day basis. Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it. No matter what merits Gnome 3 might have, it was such a flop in its first few releases that it has the Windows Vista stigma attached to it. Of course, there's GTK and several Gnome apps that people do use on a daily basis. But for many people, Gnome itself is decidedly uncool. No wonder they don't want to contribute to it. 2. If Gnome really wants to win back the hearts of potential contributors (i.e. power users), they'd better make programs that appeal to that demographic. People who have the skill and motivation to make significant contributions to a free software project often want a lot of room for configuration, including the option to use the desktop in a traditional manner. Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like slamming the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users, but none of them will ever submit a single patch. 3. Gnome is too big for its own good. Why does a desktop environment project need to maintain a complete stack of apps and libraries, from GTK to Gnome Shell to a text editor to a bundle of games to a web browser to an email client to a media player to a full-blown spreadsheet app? Why can't they just tell people to get a third-party browser? They should spin off the rest and focus on GTK, the Shell, and a small number of essential utilities. If Epiphany or Gnumeric died a slow and lonely death, how many people would really care? Heck, if you don't have the manpower to maintain anything else, just give me GTK so I can install xfce or lxde on top of it. It's really just Firefox and LibreOffice and VLC that I want, and I don't need Gnome to run them. Edit: some rephrasing.

Mr_T_ 14y ago
> Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like slamming the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users, but none of them will ever submit a single patch. An experienced developer should be mature enough to know that he and his kind should not be the target audience of his product. And putting in all those little checkboxes makes a product a horrible experience for the rest of the world.
- ilja 14y ago
  Whether you like it or not, power users are probably the only audience left for a linux DE that's no longer the default on the most newbie friendly distro's. The rest of the world is never going to see it. Open source is very much about scratching one's own itch
  - progrock 14y ago
    Isn't Unity currently built on top of Gnome 3?
    - entropy_ 14y ago
      No, it is not.
      - progrock 14y ago
        If Unity is described as a Shell for the GNOME desktop environment. Then that sounds about right to me. Perhaps better questions to ask would be what is Gnome 3? What is Gnome Shell? And what is Gnome? Sorry but it's a bit difficult to comment on Gnome when it's not entirely clear as to what it is.
      - keithpeter 14y ago
        I think Unity depends on a fair amount of gnome 3 libraries, at least in 12.04
        ralfn 14y ago
        Yes and no. They ship with a lot of gnome3 apps, but none of the unity code uses any gnome 3 libs. They do use compiz though, and have compiz use the gconf settings. The thing is, they could switch to a qt based desktop, without touching any unity code.
      - padraigm 14y ago
        This is false. Unity is an alternative to Gnome-shell; it uses (sometimes patched versions of) the same underlying Gnome 3 libraries.
Gabler 14y ago
I really did want to like Gnome 3 but just nothing about it made me want to use it over Unity. I'm a fairly new Linux user who has used quite a bit of Unity, Gnome 3 and Gnome 2. Gnome 2 is great, I wouldn't hold onto Gnome 3 just because I want to stay away from Unity. Without add-ons of some kind Gnome 3 was completely unusable for anything I wanted to use it for.
- mebesilly 14y ago
  I switched to xmonad when I realised how braindead Gnome had become.
- ajross 14y ago
  Just as a counterpoint: I'm of exactly the opposite opinion. I just couldn't get used to unity. The full-screen assumptions in early versions were baked too far into the metaphor and I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Gnome 3, on the other hand, brought new stuff to the table (like the dynamic desktops) which actually improved my workflow. It wasn't a clean transition, but I actually prefer it now.
  - niclupien 14y ago
    Same thing here. Gnome Shell integrates perfectly with my workflow while Unity does not. I would like to leave Gnome 3 for something better, but that thing is definitely not Unity. I really don't understand all the hate about Gnome 3. There is pros and cons like every other window manager. I use it everyday (mainly for coding and system administration) and it's very stable and it got everything I need and well configured by default.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
"Gnome itself is decidedly uncool. No wonder they don't want to contribute to it." This is the biggest weakness of FOSS in general. It is true that some people work on the stuff that has to get done or isn't "cool" but contrasted to "cool" parts where folks are available in abundance and it means people burn out and there is no one there so replace them. If there isn't someone out there paying someone else to be in that uncool part of the code, chances are bit rot sets in.
sciurus 14y ago
"Gnome is too big for its own good." Interestingly, the direction some GNOME developers want to take is to make it even bigger. E.G. Juan José Sánchez and Xan López's proposal for "More GNOME 3, GNOME targeting new form factors and GNOME as an OS or final product/UX". http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/#comment-1783 http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abys...
- vacri 14y ago
  I think an indicator of the philosophical problem at gnome is that they pronounce is 'guh-nome'. They take a perfectly serviceable idea, then make it awkward so it can suit some impenetrable ideological concept. I recently saw a lawyer for gnome speak, and even she had trouble sticking to 'guh-nome'. What hope do those outside the dev community have?
JoshTriplett 14y ago
I find it wryly amusing to see the entire GNOME 1 -> GNOME 2 debacle repeated so accurately. GNOME 2 eliminated a huge pile of configuration and tweakability that had accreted over the years, and produced an environment designed for user-friendliness even at the expense of some power-user configurations. It took a few releases to sort out (2.0 proved quite painful), but by GNOME 2.4 or so the environment had become far more pleasant than GNOME 1. If the GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 debate has produced more vitriol by volume, I'd say that just reflects GNOME 2 having a much larger user community than GNOME 1 ever did.
- makmanalp 14y ago
  Same with KDE3->KDE4. They released 4.0, saying it was a beta. Guess what, if you call it 4.0 and do a release announcement, people will get it no matter what you say. And then they'll judge based on your pre-release status, calling your software crap. It's the lesson no one learns.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - sho_hn 14y ago
    Let's be clear though, it went down quite similarly with Mac OS X: 10.0 was quite troublesome and not exactly well-received. Look what happened later. Ditto Vista and Win 7. The pattern is not limited to FOSS. I think the lesson here is that the circumstances at times compel platform vendors like KDE and Gnome to make these big next-gen releases, and the market compels them to do them before they're quite ready for end-user primetime, because the alternative is a serious loss of momentum, e.g. in the third-party space that is waiting for that release. And this is likely even more true in the FOSS space, because you're not just bleeding third-party interest by not shipping, but also developer recruitment. It's a balancing act. Looking back, I don't think we found quite the right balance with KDE 4.0. But realistically, shipping 4.0 only when it had achieved the quality level, of, say KDE 4.5 just wasn't going to happen, either. Because if we hadn't shipped at some point, we'd might not have gotten the influx of contributors and early adopter feedback that we needed to make 4.5 happen. Really, people are being presumptuous by saying these things happen carelessly. The reality is that there are pressures pulling you into different directions. You sometimes make bad calls under pressure. At other times you make the right call but get to chose between multiple options that each have their own downside attached.
shortlived 14y ago
Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it What do they use instead? Just gnome 2.x?
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Ubuntu: Unity Mint: KDE, Xfce, MATE, or Maya [1] 1. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031 http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031
- shortlived 14y ago
  God lord people, I was not being snarky. It was an honest question.
- splicer 14y ago
  i3 or xmonad :p
Produce 14y ago
>Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it. This is news to me since my colleague, running Ubuntu 12.04 is using Gnome/Unity. Did I miss a memo?
- wtracy 14y ago
  Unity completely replaces the Gnome shell. According the Gnome people, you're no longer using Gnome if you're not using the Gnome shell. Whether that's true is open to interpretation.
  - Produce 14y ago
    That makes sense then - I wasn't aware of the fact that Gnome Shell and Unity were distinct. Thanks for the memo!
tripzilch 14y ago
It's odd because after really trying and giving Unity a fair chance, reinstalling some Gnome was truly a breath of fresh air recently ... Also the kids I work with like it better cause apart from the huge strip of icons on the left that always gets in the way, the rest of Unity's features are not very discoverable. But maybe that's just a problem with Unity, instead of a good thing about Gnome. I'm curious to try out this Cinnamon thing for Mint, what's it based on/looks like?
- countessa 14y ago
  Cinnamon is, as far as I know, a fork of Gnome. I have it installed - prefer it to unity so far.

by kijin 14y ago

Mr_T_ 14y ago

> Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like slamming the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users, but none of them will ever submit a single patch. An experienced developer should be mature enough to know that he and his kind should not be the target audience of his product. And putting in all those little checkboxes makes a product a horrible experience for the rest of the world.

ilja 14y ago
Whether you like it or not, power users are probably the only audience left for a linux DE that's no longer the default on the most newbie friendly distro's. The rest of the world is never going to see it. Open source is very much about scratching one's own itch
- progrock 14y ago
  Isn't Unity currently built on top of Gnome 3?
  - entropy_ 14y ago
    No, it is not.
    - progrock 14y ago
      If Unity is described as a Shell for the GNOME desktop environment. Then that sounds about right to me. Perhaps better questions to ask would be what is Gnome 3? What is Gnome Shell? And what is Gnome? Sorry but it's a bit difficult to comment on Gnome when it's not entirely clear as to what it is.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      I think Unity depends on a fair amount of gnome 3 libraries, at least in 12.04
      - ralfn 14y ago
        Yes and no. They ship with a lot of gnome3 apps, but none of the unity code uses any gnome 3 libs. They do use compiz though, and have compiz use the gconf settings. The thing is, they could switch to a qt based desktop, without touching any unity code.
    - padraigm 14y ago
      This is false. Unity is an alternative to Gnome-shell; it uses (sometimes patched versions of) the same underlying Gnome 3 libraries.

Gabler 14y ago

I really did want to like Gnome 3 but just nothing about it made me want to use it over Unity. I'm a fairly new Linux user who has used quite a bit of Unity, Gnome 3 and Gnome 2. Gnome 2 is great, I wouldn't hold onto Gnome 3 just because I want to stay away from Unity. Without add-ons of some kind Gnome 3 was completely unusable for anything I wanted to use it for.

mebesilly 14y ago
I switched to xmonad when I realised how braindead Gnome had become.
ajross 14y ago
Just as a counterpoint: I'm of exactly the opposite opinion. I just couldn't get used to unity. The full-screen assumptions in early versions were baked too far into the metaphor and I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Gnome 3, on the other hand, brought new stuff to the table (like the dynamic desktops) which actually improved my workflow. It wasn't a clean transition, but I actually prefer it now.
- niclupien 14y ago
  Same thing here. Gnome Shell integrates perfectly with my workflow while Unity does not. I would like to leave Gnome 3 for something better, but that thing is definitely not Unity. I really don't understand all the hate about Gnome 3. There is pros and cons like every other window manager. I use it everyday (mainly for coding and system administration) and it's very stable and it got everything I need and well configured by default.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

"Gnome itself is decidedly uncool. No wonder they don't want to contribute to it." This is the biggest weakness of FOSS in general. It is true that some people work on the stuff that has to get done or isn't "cool" but contrasted to "cool" parts where folks are available in abundance and it means people burn out and there is no one there so replace them. If there isn't someone out there paying someone else to be in that uncool part of the code, chances are bit rot sets in.

sciurus 14y ago

"Gnome is too big for its own good." Interestingly, the direction some GNOME developers want to take is to make it even bigger. E.G. Juan José Sánchez and Xan López's proposal for "More GNOME 3, GNOME targeting new form factors and GNOME as an OS or final product/UX". http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/#comment-1783 http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abys...

vacri 14y ago
I think an indicator of the philosophical problem at gnome is that they pronounce is 'guh-nome'. They take a perfectly serviceable idea, then make it awkward so it can suit some impenetrable ideological concept. I recently saw a lawyer for gnome speak, and even she had trouble sticking to 'guh-nome'. What hope do those outside the dev community have?

JoshTriplett 14y ago

I find it wryly amusing to see the entire GNOME 1 -> GNOME 2 debacle repeated so accurately. GNOME 2 eliminated a huge pile of configuration and tweakability that had accreted over the years, and produced an environment designed for user-friendliness even at the expense of some power-user configurations. It took a few releases to sort out (2.0 proved quite painful), but by GNOME 2.4 or so the environment had become far more pleasant than GNOME 1. If the GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 debate has produced more vitriol by volume, I'd say that just reflects GNOME 2 having a much larger user community than GNOME 1 ever did.

makmanalp 14y ago
Same with KDE3->KDE4. They released 4.0, saying it was a beta. Guess what, if you call it 4.0 and do a release announcement, people will get it no matter what you say. And then they'll judge based on your pre-release status, calling your software crap. It's the lesson no one learns.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- sho_hn 14y ago
  Let's be clear though, it went down quite similarly with Mac OS X: 10.0 was quite troublesome and not exactly well-received. Look what happened later. Ditto Vista and Win 7. The pattern is not limited to FOSS. I think the lesson here is that the circumstances at times compel platform vendors like KDE and Gnome to make these big next-gen releases, and the market compels them to do them before they're quite ready for end-user primetime, because the alternative is a serious loss of momentum, e.g. in the third-party space that is waiting for that release. And this is likely even more true in the FOSS space, because you're not just bleeding third-party interest by not shipping, but also developer recruitment. It's a balancing act. Looking back, I don't think we found quite the right balance with KDE 4.0. But realistically, shipping 4.0 only when it had achieved the quality level, of, say KDE 4.5 just wasn't going to happen, either. Because if we hadn't shipped at some point, we'd might not have gotten the influx of contributors and early adopter feedback that we needed to make 4.5 happen. Really, people are being presumptuous by saying these things happen carelessly. The reality is that there are pressures pulling you into different directions. You sometimes make bad calls under pressure. At other times you make the right call but get to chose between multiple options that each have their own downside attached.

shortlived 14y ago

Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it What do they use instead? Just gnome 2.x?

SkyMarshal 14y ago
Ubuntu: Unity Mint: KDE, Xfce, MATE, or Maya [1] 1. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031 http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031
shortlived 14y ago
God lord people, I was not being snarky. It was an honest question.
splicer 14y ago
i3 or xmonad :p

Produce 14y ago

>Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it. This is news to me since my colleague, running Ubuntu 12.04 is using Gnome/Unity. Did I miss a memo?

wtracy 14y ago
Unity completely replaces the Gnome shell. According the Gnome people, you're no longer using Gnome if you're not using the Gnome shell. Whether that's true is open to interpretation.
- Produce 14y ago
  That makes sense then - I wasn't aware of the fact that Gnome Shell and Unity were distinct. Thanks for the memo!

tripzilch 14y ago

It's odd because after really trying and giving Unity a fair chance, reinstalling some Gnome was truly a breath of fresh air recently ... Also the kids I work with like it better cause apart from the huge strip of icons on the left that always gets in the way, the rest of Unity's features are not very discoverable. But maybe that's just a problem with Unity, instead of a good thing about Gnome. I'm curious to try out this Cinnamon thing for Mint, what's it based on/looks like?

countessa 14y ago
Cinnamon is, as far as I know, a fork of Gnome. I have it installed - prefer it to unity so far.