I worked on the GNOME project this past summer and went to GUADEC. Attendance at GUADEC has been steadily declining drastically over the past few years. The aud

I worked on the GNOME project this past summer and went to GUADEC. Attendance at GUADEC has been steadily declining drastically over the past few years. The auditorium had ~100 attendees during the keynote speech. Many of the side talks had < 10 listeners. ## Distributions - RedHat: Primary GNOME contributor in money and developers. Most attendees at GUADEC were Fedora users. There were a handful of Ubuntu / SUSE devs. - Ubuntu: Unity shell on top of GNOME framework. - Linux Mint: Cinnamon was originally a small project, but is currently gaining momentum. ## Simplicity There is a goal by the designers to push simplicity. They're not making these changes based on empirical evidence AFAIK, but rather gut decision. 1. For example, McCann axed a lot of features from Nautilus: http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/ Removed features: - compact view - typeahead find - split pane view - bookmark folders - backspace key to go up a directory - "tree" view - "new file" template 2. Closing laptop lid now unconditionally suspends, settings to change behavior have been removed: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687277 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687277 3. From GNOME desktop development mailing list, fallback mode will be phased out now that there is a roughly working software renderer for GNOME shell. The ones making this decision criticized users for not having a <5 year computer, completely ignoring the fact that a lot of 3rd world country users are running on older hardware. I primarily use fallback mode (with xmonad). In GNOME 3.6, a lot of stuff is just broken tagged WONTFIX. ## Touch Devices There was a heavily attended talk about touch UI support in GNOME on tablet and phone devices. I brought up this issue with the primary speaker but wasn't satisfied: How are you going to get hardware manufacturers to adopt GNOME over Android? Hardware manufacturers make money by selling devices. They will use whichever software ecosystem that positively impacts their bottom line. There are no users out there clamoring for GNOME on their tablets. By designing GNOME for touch, they are instead alienating their existing user base. ## Direction Quite simply, there is no leadership at GNOME. Yes it's a FOSS project, but maybe there needs to be a benevolent dictator driving the bus. Instead there are the designers who are trying to simplify GNOME shell. Others are moving functionality into web apps. An extremely large group wants to create a GNOME distro. One of the biggest questions proposed at GUADEC was where does GNOME go now? No one seems to know, so instead we have a few key people deciding on their own in a non-coherent fashion and the project meanders along on cruise control.