Has GNOME Rejected Canonical Help? Shuttleworth Responds 181
akgraner writes "When Canonical made the decision to make Unity the default desktop, some questioned the GNOME/Canonical relationship. Adding fuel to this fire was the recent distribution split of revenue generated by Banshee. These decisions caused the Ubuntu, GNOME and even Fedora community members to ask why these things were done. In Dave Neary's 'Has GNOME rejected Canonical help?' post, he states, 'I have repeatedly read Canonical & Ubuntu people say, "We offered our help to GNOME, and they didn't want it."' Neary gives examples in his post of what others have said to back up the 'they didn't want it' claim by Canonical and Ubuntu people. Today, though, Shuttleworth responds on his blog. 'Competition is tough on the contestants, but it gets great results for everyone else.'"
meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us disabled users are looking for an alternative operating system for our Windows XP netbooks. The compiz magnifier is great, but GNOME is the _only_ desktop environment that has a screen reader. The GNOME screen reader performs _very_ slowly on a netbook though. It even runs slow on a modern system sometimes.
My point? Can we stop with the political issues and try to just produce the best, stable, reliable system we possibly can? Can we stop changing the underlying components every two years? Can we stop changing things that don't make the system any better (like notification bubbles that require more daemons) and fix what we do have?
FreeDesktop.org is probably the way to go (Score:5, Insightful)
I heartily agree with that. I want to see Unity come out and kick butt, and it sounds like as good as GNOME Shell might be, GNOME people are forcing this into a you-vs.-us fight.
(It doesn't help to see Jeff Waugh being all complainy on Mark's blog, either.)
Re:FreeDesktop.org is probably the way to go (Score:3, Insightful)
Jeff Waugh is an absolute cancer in the GNOME project. He adds nothing to the project but is a constant source of frustration and drama. How he maintains the influence he has is truly beyond me. My only supposition is that because in the past he has done some work in the past and runs P.G.O the other members of gnome's super cliquely inner circle (what you thought getting into the foundation meant you were a real part of the project? Think again!) feel some kind of perverse loyalty towards him.
This came across as a bit ranty but Jeff Waugh really pisses me off.
Power users today (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember when a "power user" was someone who tweaked compile time options or applied a little patch. These days it seems that if there isn't an option right there in the UI then the "power users" aren't happy. They accuse projects of "dumbing down" but in reality I think it's (self proclaimed) "power users" who have dumbed down to the point that they see having to touch anything vaguely approaching the internals (such as gconf) an outrageous hurdle.