5 ms·

Why are non-gnome users always so pissed about Gnome when there apparently are so many excellent alternatives?

by VMG 13y ago

JulianMorrison 13y ago
Because we used to like it.
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
We may not use GNOME today, but many of us did happily use it before the GNOME 3 disaster. After that happened, though, we had no choice but to move to other environments. Some of us even hoped that maybe someday the situation would reverse itself, and GNOME could once again become a viable desktop environment. Unfortunately, it has become clear over time that this is not the case, and likely never will be. It's disappointing to see a project that was once quite useful, yet still with a lot of potential, be destroyed so quickly and unnecessarily. And it's perfectly acceptable and understandable for us to voice our displeasure with further degradation of what GNOME once stood for.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Because I, for one, could give two shits about the GNOME desktop environment as a whole, but find that there are occasionally useful applications written for it. Most recently, GNOME Terminal, ironically enough (it's about as non-GUI as you can get for an application, but it's a reasonably nice terminal emulator, and does a few things my trusty old rxvt doesn't: dynamic rescaling, dynamic color themes). Rhythmbox comes to mind. A few others. I really don't care where the hell my apps come from, in terms of toolkit. But if they break very-well-established Linux / Unix behaviors, it really pisses me off. I've also seen GNOME disease utterly fuck up perfectly good applications (the Galeon Web browser comes to mind). Worse, occasionally unaffiliated developers look at what GNOME is doing after a few too many hits on the crack pipe themselves and think it's a good idea. GNOME's utter user hostility and imperviousness to any level of logic or reason had already gotten old a decade ago.
- zanny 13y ago
  /shrug, I love my konsole and clementine. It can get old. Just use something else. I tried gnome3 when it happened and jumped ship like a sinking Titanic. I'm now heavily invested in kde, and version 5 isn't going to change direction into this minimalist nightmare, its still all about choice, except under the hood it gets much faster and cleaner with qt5/ gl accelerated qml.
  - michael_h 13y ago
    I have been trying to use KDE lately. I can configure it in every way imaginable, which scratches an itch for sure, but: it takes forever to start up. After login, the gnome desktop will come up almost instantly, but KDE will sit on the splash screen for a solid thirty seconds. Is there some 'go faster' setting that everyone knows about but me?
    - zanny 13y ago
      Disable the splash screen, I always do. Its in system settings around sessions, I think. You get to the desktop in a third the time but it might need a few seconds to be fully responsive. Also, nepomuk starting up will drastically slow down the boot time, so if you don't need the semantic search features disable it.
      - sergiosgc 13y ago
        Really? It's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98? Login, but don't do anything until the disk led stops blinking like mad. Depressing... Me, I've gone i3wm, but it's not for the faint of heart; And it still depends on lots of gnome utilities, like the network manager or the settings daemon.
        dredmorbius 13y ago
        It's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98? Login It really depends on your WM. Some of the heavier desktops, yes. With the lighter ones (again, I use WindowMaker), I'm up and running in a couple of seconds (there are some apps and utilities which take a few seconds to launch). The mouseless / tiling WMs (such as i3wm) are pretty cool as well.
keithpeter 13y ago
Actually, I rather like Gnome as evident in the version that came with Gnome Ubuntu 13.04, but that is besides the point. RHEL 7 will ship with a Gnome desktop on desktop clients, and whatever Red Hat release will be cloned into CentOS, Scientific Linux and Springfield Linux. That, I gather, in total, is rather a large number of screens. The users of those screens in various organisations will not be able to install a different DE as they (may) not have admin rights and (may) not have access to repositories with alternative DEs available. Red Hat have already suggested that they will be releasing the RHEL 7 desktop with gnome classic as the default to minimise training costs. If anyone here knows of a RHEL type managed system with a large number of screens, it would be interesting to see how RHEL 7 is accepted over the next few years (of course, they may decide not to upgrade until RHEL6 is EoL).
gnoway 13y ago
Because it leeches potential talent away from other projects? I don't really have a big ax to grind with Gnome, but I don't understand why it remained relevant after the KDE/Qt licensing issue was resolved.
chris_wot 13y ago
A lot of us are Gnome users.

Why are non-gnome users always so pissed about Gnome when there apparently are so many excellent alternatives?

by VMG 13y ago

Why are non-gnome users always so pissed about Gnome when there apparently are so many excellent alternatives?

JulianMorrison 13y ago

Because we used to like it.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago

We may not use GNOME today, but many of us did happily use it before the GNOME 3 disaster. After that happened, though, we had no choice but to move to other environments. Some of us even hoped that maybe someday the situation would reverse itself, and GNOME could once again become a viable desktop environment. Unfortunately, it has become clear over time that this is not the case, and likely never will be. It's disappointing to see a project that was once quite useful, yet still with a lot of potential, be destroyed so quickly and unnecessarily. And it's perfectly acceptable and understandable for us to voice our displeasure with further degradation of what GNOME once stood for.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Because I, for one, could give two shits about the GNOME desktop environment as a whole, but find that there are occasionally useful applications written for it. Most recently, GNOME Terminal, ironically enough (it's about as non-GUI as you can get for an application, but it's a reasonably nice terminal emulator, and does a few things my trusty old rxvt doesn't: dynamic rescaling, dynamic color themes). Rhythmbox comes to mind. A few others. I really don't care where the hell my apps come from, in terms of toolkit. But if they break very-well-established Linux / Unix behaviors, it really pisses me off. I've also seen GNOME disease utterly fuck up perfectly good applications (the Galeon Web browser comes to mind). Worse, occasionally unaffiliated developers look at what GNOME is doing after a few too many hits on the crack pipe themselves and think it's a good idea. GNOME's utter user hostility and imperviousness to any level of logic or reason had already gotten old a decade ago.

zanny 13y ago
/shrug, I love my konsole and clementine. It can get old. Just use something else. I tried gnome3 when it happened and jumped ship like a sinking Titanic. I'm now heavily invested in kde, and version 5 isn't going to change direction into this minimalist nightmare, its still all about choice, except under the hood it gets much faster and cleaner with qt5/ gl accelerated qml.
- michael_h 13y ago
  I have been trying to use KDE lately. I can configure it in every way imaginable, which scratches an itch for sure, but: it takes forever to start up. After login, the gnome desktop will come up almost instantly, but KDE will sit on the splash screen for a solid thirty seconds. Is there some 'go faster' setting that everyone knows about but me?
  - zanny 13y ago
    Disable the splash screen, I always do. Its in system settings around sessions, I think. You get to the desktop in a third the time but it might need a few seconds to be fully responsive. Also, nepomuk starting up will drastically slow down the boot time, so if you don't need the semantic search features disable it.
    - sergiosgc 13y ago
      Really? It's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98? Login, but don't do anything until the disk led stops blinking like mad. Depressing... Me, I've gone i3wm, but it's not for the faint of heart; And it still depends on lots of gnome utilities, like the network manager or the settings daemon.
      - dredmorbius 13y ago
        It's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98? Login It really depends on your WM. Some of the heavier desktops, yes. With the lighter ones (again, I use WindowMaker), I'm up and running in a couple of seconds (there are some apps and utilities which take a few seconds to launch). The mouseless / tiling WMs (such as i3wm) are pretty cool as well.

keithpeter 13y ago

Actually, I rather like Gnome as evident in the version that came with Gnome Ubuntu 13.04, but that is besides the point. RHEL 7 will ship with a Gnome desktop on desktop clients, and whatever Red Hat release will be cloned into CentOS, Scientific Linux and Springfield Linux. That, I gather, in total, is rather a large number of screens. The users of those screens in various organisations will not be able to install a different DE as they (may) not have admin rights and (may) not have access to repositories with alternative DEs available. Red Hat have already suggested that they will be releasing the RHEL 7 desktop with gnome classic as the default to minimise training costs. If anyone here knows of a RHEL type managed system with a large number of screens, it would be interesting to see how RHEL 7 is accepted over the next few years (of course, they may decide not to upgrade until RHEL6 is EoL).

gnoway 13y ago

Because it leeches potential talent away from other projects? I don't really have a big ax to grind with Gnome, but I don't understand why it remained relevant after the KDE/Qt licensing issue was resolved.

chris_wot 13y ago

A lot of us are Gnome users.