28 ms·

The future of GNOME

118 points by bergie 14y ago

bergie 14y ago
HN discussion about the piece this is responding to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4300472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4300472
PaulHoule 14y ago
Who speaks for the users? (Or could it be that there aren't any users?)
- TylerE 14y ago
  That's the real issue. Gnome and Unity are both targeted at some sort of hypothetical casual linux user, that doesn't really exist. Casual users DO exist, but they want iOS, not Linux - or more generally - an appliance, not a general purpose tool.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    This entire conversation is incredibly disappointing. It feels like a giant echo chamber, a handful of people who don't like Unity/Gnome3 who hear each other complaining and assume that means the entire Linux universe feels the same way. Everyone I listen to hates Gnome 3, that must mean everyone hates Gnome 3! The truth is, there are people who like Unity and there are people who like Gnome 3. You're just not hearing them because the negative types are yelling over top of them. The people who like the new WMs don't have anything to add to this discussion because the entire discussion is about how those people don't exist. I feel like if I mention that I'm using Unity right now and I like it, I feel like I'll be told "no you're not and no you don't, case closed." You don't like it. We get it. But claiming that these people don't exist seems a little disingenuous when obviously they do or Ubuntu wouldn't be quite such a popular distro. Unless you're suggesting everyone downloads Ubuntu and then immediately installs a different WM?
    - TylerE 14y ago
      There were plenty of people who liked AOL too. Does that mean we should still be on dialup? PS: I've read very, very, few comments, on any site, from people who claim to "like" Unity. At best it's more of a "it's not as bad as everyone says".
      - tomrod 14y ago
        > At best it's more of a "it's not as bad as everyone says". This is the camp I fall in. It's not that I don't mind the new, improved, eye-candy-focused drive of Unity and Gnome3. But why abandon the products that worked to begin with?
      - wtetzner 14y ago
        Well, it's tricky. People that are happy with their desktop environment are not particularly likely to go to some site and talk about how good it is. They'll just happily use it.
      - natrius 14y ago
        Unity is the best desktop I've ever used.
        dictus 14y ago
        Have you used other desktops?
        natrius 14y ago
        Windows since 3.1 (though I was never an every day user of Vista and 7), OS X pre-Lion, GNOME 2, KDE 3. OS X has a better combination of desktop quality and application support, but if Unity could magically run OS X apps, I don't think I'd ever use or recommend anything else.
      - freehunter 14y ago
        I like Unity. I don't like it enough to go on a forum and tell everyone I like it, but then again there are few things I like enough that I feel I have to tell everyone about my enjoyment. The people who talk the loudest are the people complaining, that's how it always is, has been, and forever will be. When I worked internal tech support I had users call and complain about Windows 7, asking to go back to DOS. These people stood out more than the 90% of users who enjoyed Windows 7 simply because the complainers were motivated enough to complain and curmudgeonly enough to make such a ridiculous request. The difference is, those users were forced to use software they didn't like. That's hardly the case here.
  - mrintegrity 14y ago
    I use gnome3 and gnome-shell every day, I have used linux based distros for something like 13 years now and have used many different desktop paradigms. After about a year or so of using KDE I switched to Gnome, and then to Blackbox and then Fluxbox and eventually ION. For me, now that I am accustomed to the various shortcuts and key combinations, gnome3 is amazingly fast to use compared to gnome2 (and any "start menu" based desktop). I really don't know how I could go back! Whenever I have to use a relatives computer it's an incredibly frustrating and slow affair with my hand instinctively flying up to the top left only to find that nothing happens. First thing I do when sitting at my own desk is throwing the mouse pointer (or hitting the "windows" key) and typing "ter" and pressing enter.. terminal appears and work begins.. Gnome3 is open source and Free Software, those who don't like it will move to the gnome2 fork and I am sure will be very happy. You can't force everyone to use (and develop) the desktop that you want, that's the whole point! "But no one is using it!": well, I think the gnome3 developers are probably using it daily.. and if noone else in the world was a user, maybe they would still be producing it for their own benefit.. would you still ridicule it in that case?
monkeyfacebag 14y ago
GNOME 3 is a really great, well integrated (if not particularly innovative) desktop environment. Unfortunately, it broke existing workflows, which led to a great deal of criticism on its release. Had GNOME 3 had been a new, unrelated product rather than the next version of GNOME, there would be, if not more excitement about it, at least less criticism. Making radical changes to an incumbent system is difficult and often thankless, even when the new version is, if not objectively better than the previous, very good. Apple encountered this with the transition to OS X. Anyone who remembers the "Classic" environment can attest to how poorly this transition was perceived by many Mac fans. Microsoft has a real problem on its hands trying to convince users that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7. Ultimately, GNOME 3 feels like a much better designed environment than the previous version. For those that tried an early release and gave up on it, I'd encourage you to go back and try it again.
- omi 14y ago
  I tried really hard to use gnome 3 on several distros, it just doesn't work. All that pretty crap doesn't add to my workflow. No icons on desktop? Keyboard shortcuts don't work, everything freezes from time to time for no reason. Not really workable on a laptop to, CPU is constantly running hot. Went back to gnome 2 or XFCE on other systems.
- CoffeeDregs 14y ago
  100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style "switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2. The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect. The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.
  - mertd 14y ago
jussij 14y ago
> maybe the time is ripe for us to strenghten our positions in the server and desktop markets? I always thought GNOME was a desktop system. Not sure how they plan to take that desktop system and target it as a server platform?
- wmf 14y ago
  There may be a market for Apple-like Linux server admin tools. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/the-server-simplified-a-power-users-guide-to-os-x-server/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/the-server-simplified-a...
  - dman 14y ago
    But will people pay for these?
    - wmf 14y ago
      Of course, I meant "market" in the Linux sense. People won't pay for any of this GNOME stuff.
- pyre 14y ago
  Well, they do cover things like video conferencing, which may have a back-end component.
- bergie 14y ago
  With Midgard we've been using some GNOME libraries like D-Bus and libgda on servers for years. And this will bring the whole set of GNOME libraries to Node.js: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/node-gir/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/node-gir/
RobAley 14y ago
While I agree with the gist of what he says, I disagree with his assessment of Unity. Specifically he compares it with Eazel and Ximian, but I think its different in that it has much more user acceptance, the backing of a much more popular distro, and is much more refined and mainstream than those projects. It won't topple gnome, but it will take much more market share.
- ajross 14y ago
  It's not clear to me that it really has significantly more user acceptance. Unity was likewise the subject of much criticism, and drove many Ubuntu users away (like me, ironically to Fedora/Gnome3). What saved Unity, I think, is firstly that it had time to get farther along the development curve before Canonical released it into the wild as the default (where Fedora 15 was shockingly rough around the edges) and second that Ubuntu has become the default development environment for cooking Android images, drawing a bunch of new users who aren't attached to the old Gnome 2 models.
tomrod 14y ago
If I could say anything to the Gnome3team: "I used gnome 3 shell for 6 months until I could no longer stand it. Please please, Gnome team, go back to Gnome2 or Mate. The desktop really doesn't need reinventing. You're solving fixed problems!" Unfortunately, I don't know how well the open source adopts the philosophical concept of sunk costs.
- monkeyfacebag 14y ago
  > The desktop really doesn't need reinventing. I'm surprised people think this. Do you think we're going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years? Sure, the relative importance of the desktop will diminish as other forms of input become viable, but we're not there yet. I still do 95% of my work in a desktop environment with multiple windows and everything, just like I did 10 years ago. The difference is that the desktop environments I have access to now are better than the ones I had then. I hope that trend continues.
  - 10098 14y ago
    > Do you think we're going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years? I sure hope so. It's ideal for laptops and desktop PCs, or at least none of the alternatives are good enough.
    - freehunter 14y ago
      Are the alternatives worse, or are they just different? Obviously anything sufficiently different enough to be called disruptive is going to throw off your workflow. The mitigating factor in how much anyone is going to like change is how quickly they can adapt to the change. If the answer is never (or a long time), the change stops being relevant (think Dvorak keyboard). If the answer is reasonably quickly, you find a sliding scale of market penetration between trackball mice and computers that print stdout to screens instead of paper. The question is, is the desktop metaphor still a good one? I would argue it never was good, just necessary. My question is, why do I have to move my mouse here and there to get things done on a desktop? Why is it so painful to use a laptop trackpad to get here and there with any accuracy? Newer window managers try to mitigate that by removing the need for a mouse altogether. That's a step in the right direction, I think.
debacle 14y ago
The future of GNOME: http://mate-desktop.org/ http://mate-desktop.org/
- bergie 14y ago
  This seems to be a common reaction to new major versions. After KDE4 came out people also started their own KDE3 fork: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php http://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php
  - mpyne 14y ago
    And that was despite KDE4 being much more similar to KDE3 than GNOME 3 is to GNOME 2.
- bkor 14y ago
  Did you actually look at the commits? They're releasing new versions, but the amount of commits is very low. It seems pretty limited to running source code through lint, updated translations and fixing typo's in stuff that was changed. Anyway, this is not the future of GNOME. Different projects and all that.
- sandGorgon 14y ago
  Cinnamon is a better alternative, since it is/will be default on Mint (THE most popular linux distro on distrowatch) and its built on GTK3 and the Gnome3 toolkits - which should be better supported going forward.
ivarkotnik 14y ago
Not to be a "Negative Nancy", but quite a bit speaks against G3's current direction in terms of blog posts and participation. Especially the latter is easy to verify. Go to their mailinglists and see the level activity, it sure does not look very good. Reading the actual mailinglists gives sometimes a quite disturbing image as well, with a few examples already linked in Mr. Ottes mentioned blog post.
- bergie 14y ago
  You can see some decrease in the number of contributors: https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/contributors/summary https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/contributors/summary However, note that the current slide in the numbers is something that only happened after February-March 2012, which was when the previous major release was launched. In 2010 another slide lasted from April until October, so I suppose there is a need to worry if contributions don't pick up around Sep-Oct. That said, the situation for GNOME is certainly different now, given that they lost their biggest distribution channel in Ubuntu doing their own thing.
  - bkor 14y ago
    The number of commits always pick up before a major release and drop off afterwards. If you try to conclude anything from your analysis, please be a bit thorough!
    - bergie 14y ago
      I thought that was exactly what I said in my comment.
10098 14y ago
tl;dr: "lalala, we can't hear you, we'll keep doing what we're doing". Looks like I'm not coming back to gnome in the foreseeable future.
m0skit0 14y ago
Nice article and I agree. I have forced myself to use GNOME3 at work and honestly I like it. I think most people criticizing it haven't use it enough. It's a new workflow, and as such, you need some training to get to work as fast (or in this case faster) as before. Just imagine how first mouse users felt. It should have been a horrible experience, but good things last. And IMHO GNOME3 will last. Keep up the good work!
mpyne 14y ago
I find it amusing how Christian says they moved away from "their" ESD to a standard PulseAudio. ESD was the Enlightenment Sound Daemon (though it may have been maintained by GNOME hackers at the end), and PulseAudio is only "standard" insofar as it was included by default with most distros (i.e. ESD or aRts would have been "standard" under that definition). KDE at least supports PulseAudio better than ESD but it could as easily have supported ESD if it were necessary, especially if there was as much support from ESD devs as was provided by PulseAudio devs (ESD was already in its nadir before KDE 4.0 thanks to broad usage of gstreamer making ESD redundant for most audio needs).
- bkor 14y ago
  PulseAudio is used by almost all distributions and GNOME settled on it. ESD was not used by all distributions, furthermore it had bugs and wasn't maintained. Also, Gstreamer is not the same as PulseAudio.
dman 14y ago
Could someone using gnome3 here comment on the status of multi monitor support?
- gdw2 14y ago
  I have my laptop hooked up to two external displays (three displays total) and it works great. Originally in gnome 3, when it came to virtual workspaces your non-primary displays were fixed, but they added an option to allow virtual workspaces on all displays.
  - dman 14y ago
    Awesome - thanks!
dredmorbius 14y ago
The GNOME team really doesn't get it. When you've got your own people, tons of power users, ordinary users, and key kernel devs telling you you've gone astray, something's wrong. What we're seeing is fortress mentality and hunkering down. Wrong move. Ted T'so has commented on his desktop woes at length on G+. I lifted one a reply he made to his own post which I feel gets to the heart of the problem, and what is really necessary for a desktop solution (probably XFCE4 for most people these days). Note that Ted's including both GNOME and KDE in his criticisms: My concern with KDE is how bloated it's become. I don't want highly integrated applications. My main applications are a terminal, emacs, open office, and the Chrome browser. I do way more with web applications these days. Bloat is bad not just because of the increased disk and ram usage (although I do worry about that); bloat is bad because of the complexity. The more you rely on an Object broker, the more it becomes harder and harder to fix things when they break --- and things do break, with appalling regularity. It's the fact that Xfce and Network-Manager uses D-Bus and PolicyKit which is why I still get asked for my password from time to time even with my localauthority hack. How do I fix it? Who knows? Unfortunately wicd isn't fully-featured enough, but it has as a huge win the fact that it doesn't use PolicyKit; it just uses a simple Unix group membership check for its access control. Once wicd can handle large numbers of access points with the same wireless network, I'll be removing network manager from my system and using wicd instead, because network manager is just too damn complicated, and relies on too much complex infrastructure which I can't debug because of the !@#@! D-Bus design. KDE is no better in this regard, and in fact it may be worse. Why don't I use Openbox? It's too simple. For one thing, it doesn't support 3x3 workspaces. At the end of the day, I want a desktop environment that makes the things that I do simple. Which means wireless roaming, the terminal, emacs, open office, and a browser. Anything more than that increases the memory and disk usage, but worse, it means more infrastructure which can break, which means I end up having to debug things like PolicyKit. And that's just not productive time for me. So Xfce seems like the right balance point for now, although it definitely still has some rough edges. https://plus.google.com/u/0/117091380454742934025/posts/VjbFCa7X5NJ https://plus.google.com/u/0/117091380454742934025/posts/VjbF... Once again: HN needs a proper blockquote markdown.
- sciurus 14y ago
  That really hits home. What pushed me over the edge in my switch (from GNOME 3 on Fedora 16 to i3 on Debian Testing) was my inability to debug problems with wireless networking. "Modern" linux plumbing like PolicyKit and NetworkManager is complex, fast-moving, and under-documented.
scribblemacher 14y ago
I used GNOME 3 for awhile. Of all the heavy, DE-style desktops, I like GNOME 3. I use Awesome WM more often because it's lighter and saves precious battery on my laptop, but GNOME 3 is zippy and mostly stays out of my way. As long as you can access a terminal quickly, everything else is really window dressing.

118 points by bergie 14y ago

HN discussion about the piece this is responding to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4300472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4300472

PaulHoule 14y ago

Who speaks for the users? (Or could it be that there aren't any users?)

TylerE 14y ago
That's the real issue. Gnome and Unity are both targeted at some sort of hypothetical casual linux user, that doesn't really exist. Casual users DO exist, but they want iOS, not Linux - or more generally - an appliance, not a general purpose tool.
- freehunter 14y ago
  This entire conversation is incredibly disappointing. It feels like a giant echo chamber, a handful of people who don't like Unity/Gnome3 who hear each other complaining and assume that means the entire Linux universe feels the same way. Everyone I listen to hates Gnome 3, that must mean everyone hates Gnome 3! The truth is, there are people who like Unity and there are people who like Gnome 3. You're just not hearing them because the negative types are yelling over top of them. The people who like the new WMs don't have anything to add to this discussion because the entire discussion is about how those people don't exist. I feel like if I mention that I'm using Unity right now and I like it, I feel like I'll be told "no you're not and no you don't, case closed." You don't like it. We get it. But claiming that these people don't exist seems a little disingenuous when obviously they do or Ubuntu wouldn't be quite such a popular distro. Unless you're suggesting everyone downloads Ubuntu and then immediately installs a different WM?
  - TylerE 14y ago
    There were plenty of people who liked AOL too. Does that mean we should still be on dialup? PS: I've read very, very, few comments, on any site, from people who claim to "like" Unity. At best it's more of a "it's not as bad as everyone says".
    - tomrod 14y ago
      > At best it's more of a "it's not as bad as everyone says". This is the camp I fall in. It's not that I don't mind the new, improved, eye-candy-focused drive of Unity and Gnome3. But why abandon the products that worked to begin with?
    - wtetzner 14y ago
      Well, it's tricky. People that are happy with their desktop environment are not particularly likely to go to some site and talk about how good it is. They'll just happily use it.
    - natrius 14y ago
      Unity is the best desktop I've ever used.
      - dictus 14y ago
        Have you used other desktops?
        natrius 14y ago
        Windows since 3.1 (though I was never an every day user of Vista and 7), OS X pre-Lion, GNOME 2, KDE 3. OS X has a better combination of desktop quality and application support, but if Unity could magically run OS X apps, I don't think I'd ever use or recommend anything else.
    - freehunter 14y ago
      I like Unity. I don't like it enough to go on a forum and tell everyone I like it, but then again there are few things I like enough that I feel I have to tell everyone about my enjoyment. The people who talk the loudest are the people complaining, that's how it always is, has been, and forever will be. When I worked internal tech support I had users call and complain about Windows 7, asking to go back to DOS. These people stood out more than the 90% of users who enjoyed Windows 7 simply because the complainers were motivated enough to complain and curmudgeonly enough to make such a ridiculous request. The difference is, those users were forced to use software they didn't like. That's hardly the case here.
- mrintegrity 14y ago
  I use gnome3 and gnome-shell every day, I have used linux based distros for something like 13 years now and have used many different desktop paradigms. After about a year or so of using KDE I switched to Gnome, and then to Blackbox and then Fluxbox and eventually ION. For me, now that I am accustomed to the various shortcuts and key combinations, gnome3 is amazingly fast to use compared to gnome2 (and any "start menu" based desktop). I really don't know how I could go back! Whenever I have to use a relatives computer it's an incredibly frustrating and slow affair with my hand instinctively flying up to the top left only to find that nothing happens. First thing I do when sitting at my own desk is throwing the mouse pointer (or hitting the "windows" key) and typing "ter" and pressing enter.. terminal appears and work begins.. Gnome3 is open source and Free Software, those who don't like it will move to the gnome2 fork and I am sure will be very happy. You can't force everyone to use (and develop) the desktop that you want, that's the whole point! "But no one is using it!": well, I think the gnome3 developers are probably using it daily.. and if noone else in the world was a user, maybe they would still be producing it for their own benefit.. would you still ridicule it in that case?

monkeyfacebag 14y ago

GNOME 3 is a really great, well integrated (if not particularly innovative) desktop environment. Unfortunately, it broke existing workflows, which led to a great deal of criticism on its release. Had GNOME 3 had been a new, unrelated product rather than the next version of GNOME, there would be, if not more excitement about it, at least less criticism. Making radical changes to an incumbent system is difficult and often thankless, even when the new version is, if not objectively better than the previous, very good. Apple encountered this with the transition to OS X. Anyone who remembers the "Classic" environment can attest to how poorly this transition was perceived by many Mac fans. Microsoft has a real problem on its hands trying to convince users that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7. Ultimately, GNOME 3 feels like a much better designed environment than the previous version. For those that tried an early release and gave up on it, I'd encourage you to go back and try it again.

omi 14y ago
I tried really hard to use gnome 3 on several distros, it just doesn't work. All that pretty crap doesn't add to my workflow. No icons on desktop? Keyboard shortcuts don't work, everything freezes from time to time for no reason. Not really workable on a laptop to, CPU is constantly running hot. Went back to gnome 2 or XFCE on other systems.
CoffeeDregs 14y ago
100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style "switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2. The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect. The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.
- mertd 14y ago

jussij 14y ago

> maybe the time is ripe for us to strenghten our positions in the server and desktop markets? I always thought GNOME was a desktop system. Not sure how they plan to take that desktop system and target it as a server platform?

wmf 14y ago
There may be a market for Apple-like Linux server admin tools. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/the-server-simplified-a-power-users-guide-to-os-x-server/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/the-server-simplified-a...
- dman 14y ago
  But will people pay for these?
  - wmf 14y ago
    Of course, I meant "market" in the Linux sense. People won't pay for any of this GNOME stuff.
pyre 14y ago
Well, they do cover things like video conferencing, which may have a back-end component.
bergie 14y ago
With Midgard we've been using some GNOME libraries like D-Bus and libgda on servers for years. And this will bring the whole set of GNOME libraries to Node.js: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/node-gir/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/node-gir/

RobAley 14y ago

While I agree with the gist of what he says, I disagree with his assessment of Unity. Specifically he compares it with Eazel and Ximian, but I think its different in that it has much more user acceptance, the backing of a much more popular distro, and is much more refined and mainstream than those projects. It won't topple gnome, but it will take much more market share.

ajross 14y ago
It's not clear to me that it really has significantly more user acceptance. Unity was likewise the subject of much criticism, and drove many Ubuntu users away (like me, ironically to Fedora/Gnome3). What saved Unity, I think, is firstly that it had time to get farther along the development curve before Canonical released it into the wild as the default (where Fedora 15 was shockingly rough around the edges) and second that Ubuntu has become the default development environment for cooking Android images, drawing a bunch of new users who aren't attached to the old Gnome 2 models.

tomrod 14y ago

If I could say anything to the Gnome3team: "I used gnome 3 shell for 6 months until I could no longer stand it. Please please, Gnome team, go back to Gnome2 or Mate. The desktop really doesn't need reinventing. You're solving fixed problems!" Unfortunately, I don't know how well the open source adopts the philosophical concept of sunk costs.

monkeyfacebag 14y ago
> The desktop really doesn't need reinventing. I'm surprised people think this. Do you think we're going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years? Sure, the relative importance of the desktop will diminish as other forms of input become viable, but we're not there yet. I still do 95% of my work in a desktop environment with multiple windows and everything, just like I did 10 years ago. The difference is that the desktop environments I have access to now are better than the ones I had then. I hope that trend continues.
- 10098 14y ago
  > Do you think we're going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years? I sure hope so. It's ideal for laptops and desktop PCs, or at least none of the alternatives are good enough.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    Are the alternatives worse, or are they just different? Obviously anything sufficiently different enough to be called disruptive is going to throw off your workflow. The mitigating factor in how much anyone is going to like change is how quickly they can adapt to the change. If the answer is never (or a long time), the change stops being relevant (think Dvorak keyboard). If the answer is reasonably quickly, you find a sliding scale of market penetration between trackball mice and computers that print stdout to screens instead of paper. The question is, is the desktop metaphor still a good one? I would argue it never was good, just necessary. My question is, why do I have to move my mouse here and there to get things done on a desktop? Why is it so painful to use a laptop trackpad to get here and there with any accuracy? Newer window managers try to mitigate that by removing the need for a mouse altogether. That's a step in the right direction, I think.

debacle 14y ago

The future of GNOME: http://mate-desktop.org/ http://mate-desktop.org/

bergie 14y ago
This seems to be a common reaction to new major versions. After KDE4 came out people also started their own KDE3 fork: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php http://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php
- mpyne 14y ago
  And that was despite KDE4 being much more similar to KDE3 than GNOME 3 is to GNOME 2.
bkor 14y ago
Did you actually look at the commits? They're releasing new versions, but the amount of commits is very low. It seems pretty limited to running source code through lint, updated translations and fixing typo's in stuff that was changed. Anyway, this is not the future of GNOME. Different projects and all that.
sandGorgon 14y ago
Cinnamon is a better alternative, since it is/will be default on Mint (THE most popular linux distro on distrowatch) and its built on GTK3 and the Gnome3 toolkits - which should be better supported going forward.

ivarkotnik 14y ago

Not to be a "Negative Nancy", but quite a bit speaks against G3's current direction in terms of blog posts and participation. Especially the latter is easy to verify. Go to their mailinglists and see the level activity, it sure does not look very good. Reading the actual mailinglists gives sometimes a quite disturbing image as well, with a few examples already linked in Mr. Ottes mentioned blog post.

bergie 14y ago
You can see some decrease in the number of contributors: https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/contributors/summary https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/contributors/summary However, note that the current slide in the numbers is something that only happened after February-March 2012, which was when the previous major release was launched. In 2010 another slide lasted from April until October, so I suppose there is a need to worry if contributions don't pick up around Sep-Oct. That said, the situation for GNOME is certainly different now, given that they lost their biggest distribution channel in Ubuntu doing their own thing.
- bkor 14y ago
  The number of commits always pick up before a major release and drop off afterwards. If you try to conclude anything from your analysis, please be a bit thorough!
  - bergie 14y ago
    I thought that was exactly what I said in my comment.

10098 14y ago

tl;dr: "lalala, we can't hear you, we'll keep doing what we're doing". Looks like I'm not coming back to gnome in the foreseeable future.

m0skit0 14y ago

Nice article and I agree. I have forced myself to use GNOME3 at work and honestly I like it. I think most people criticizing it haven't use it enough. It's a new workflow, and as such, you need some training to get to work as fast (or in this case faster) as before. Just imagine how first mouse users felt. It should have been a horrible experience, but good things last. And IMHO GNOME3 will last. Keep up the good work!

mpyne 14y ago

I find it amusing how Christian says they moved away from "their" ESD to a standard PulseAudio. ESD was the Enlightenment Sound Daemon (though it may have been maintained by GNOME hackers at the end), and PulseAudio is only "standard" insofar as it was included by default with most distros (i.e. ESD or aRts would have been "standard" under that definition). KDE at least supports PulseAudio better than ESD but it could as easily have supported ESD if it were necessary, especially if there was as much support from ESD devs as was provided by PulseAudio devs (ESD was already in its nadir before KDE 4.0 thanks to broad usage of gstreamer making ESD redundant for most audio needs).

bkor 14y ago
PulseAudio is used by almost all distributions and GNOME settled on it. ESD was not used by all distributions, furthermore it had bugs and wasn't maintained. Also, Gstreamer is not the same as PulseAudio.

dman 14y ago

Could someone using gnome3 here comment on the status of multi monitor support?

gdw2 14y ago
I have my laptop hooked up to two external displays (three displays total) and it works great. Originally in gnome 3, when it came to virtual workspaces your non-primary displays were fixed, but they added an option to allow virtual workspaces on all displays.
- dman 14y ago
  Awesome - thanks!

dredmorbius 14y ago

The GNOME team really doesn't get it. When you've got your own people, tons of power users, ordinary users, and key kernel devs telling you you've gone astray, something's wrong. What we're seeing is fortress mentality and hunkering down. Wrong move. Ted T'so has commented on his desktop woes at length on G+. I lifted one a reply he made to his own post which I feel gets to the heart of the problem, and what is really necessary for a desktop solution (probably XFCE4 for most people these days). Note that Ted's including both GNOME and KDE in his criticisms: My concern with KDE is how bloated it's become. I don't want highly integrated applications. My main applications are a terminal, emacs, open office, and the Chrome browser. I do way more with web applications these days. Bloat is bad not just because of the increased disk and ram usage (although I do worry about that); bloat is bad because of the complexity. The more you rely on an Object broker, the more it becomes harder and harder to fix things when they break --- and things do break, with appalling regularity. It's the fact that Xfce and Network-Manager uses D-Bus and PolicyKit which is why I still get asked for my password from time to time even with my localauthority hack. How do I fix it? Who knows? Unfortunately wicd isn't fully-featured enough, but it has as a huge win the fact that it doesn't use PolicyKit; it just uses a simple Unix group membership check for its access control. Once wicd can handle large numbers of access points with the same wireless network, I'll be removing network manager from my system and using wicd instead, because network manager is just too damn complicated, and relies on too much complex infrastructure which I can't debug because of the !@#@! D-Bus design. KDE is no better in this regard, and in fact it may be worse. Why don't I use Openbox? It's too simple. For one thing, it doesn't support 3x3 workspaces. At the end of the day, I want a desktop environment that makes the things that I do simple. Which means wireless roaming, the terminal, emacs, open office, and a browser. Anything more than that increases the memory and disk usage, but worse, it means more infrastructure which can break, which means I end up having to debug things like PolicyKit. And that's just not productive time for me. So Xfce seems like the right balance point for now, although it definitely still has some rough edges. https://plus.google.com/u/0/117091380454742934025/posts/VjbFCa7X5NJ https://plus.google.com/u/0/117091380454742934025/posts/VjbF... Once again: HN needs a proper blockquote markdown.

sciurus 14y ago
That really hits home. What pushed me over the edge in my switch (from GNOME 3 on Fedora 16 to i3 on Debian Testing) was my inability to debug problems with wireless networking. "Modern" linux plumbing like PolicyKit and NetworkManager is complex, fast-moving, and under-documented.

scribblemacher 14y ago

I used GNOME 3 for awhile. Of all the heavy, DE-style desktops, I like GNOME 3. I use Awesome WM more often because it's lighter and saves precious battery on my laptop, but GNOME 3 is zippy and mostly stays out of my way. As long as you can access a terminal quickly, everything else is really window dressing.