Interview With GNOME 3 Designer Jon McCann 294
An anonymous reader writes "In an extensive interview, GNOME 3 designer Jon McCann talks about the future of GNOME 3 — why it's all about the apps and why he is convinced that KDE and Ubuntu are actually different operating systems. He also reacts to the outspoken criticism against GNOME 3, which has been making the rounds lately."
Translation: (Score:4, Interesting)
Translation: The newest butthurt diva within the FOSS community has scathing words for why users should just unquestioningly bow down to the decisions of the almighty developers rather than *gasp* criticizing their work when it's crap. First Asa, now this turd? Who's next in the FOSS lineup for being a butthurt diva?
Re:So much wasted time... (Score:5, Interesting)
I really got a chuckle out of this. A wise man said "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" and GNOME is posterchild for that saying. The GNOME 1.x series had a lot of potential and was starting to be really usable when they scratched it entirely in favour of GNOME2. It wasnt just that 2 was released in a very early unusable state, though that was true too - but deeper design level decisions consistently ensured that, even once the bugs were worked out and the project more finished, it would certainly never be useful for me. Sure, if I had forced myself to use it for all the intervening years I suppose I could have gotten used to it - the way people eventually get used to having leprosy or chronic excema. But why would I do that to myself, and why would anyone else? Even if you agreed with the design atrocities involved in GNOME2, surely seeing that transition should have warned you that they would just scrap it and make something even more monstrous once it started to get properly polished.
And now all you fools that stuck with them through 2, submitted to their control of your computer, taught yourself to work with their broken interface and even convinced yourself it was an improvement... now they tell you to get screwed and just break it all again. I laugh.
Another photo app, document app, music app?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Early in the interview he says that they need to write apps for "things that every computer needs to be able to do. Like managing photos, music and documents. So we want to write some of those basic utilities, that are more part of the OS than a third-party-application would be."
The only conclusion I can draw from such a statement is that the existing Gnome apps are crap. Why else reinvent the wheel?!
iPad envy (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that the top thing mentioned as still needing improvement for 3.2 is "touch" reinforces the idea that this whole insanity was aimed at being more touchpad friendly all along. Why all these desktop GUIs feel they should work toward that unproductive metaphor lately boggles my mind; it's like the hipsters have taken over open-source development. When I can get a cheap touchpad 30" monitor to replace the one I use on my desktop, maybe I'll be willing to consider a move in that direction. Seems a long way off.
Re:More time? (Score:3, Interesting)
This! The GNOMEs could go as insane as the wanted to and not cause much harm if RedHat didn't enable them. If Fedora announced it was making GNOME Desktop an alternate spin for F17 the problem would be over. Port the old Gnome parts to Gtk3 and put the standard desktop oriented desktop back as the default environment. Then the diehard GNOMEs could officially declare they are doing a tablet OS to compete with MeeGo and Android and go off and either succeed or fail without harming the rest of the FreeDesktop efforts. But too many GNOMEs draw a paycheck at RedHat and are decisionmakers in the Fedora Project.
Back when GNOME was working with Sun on usability this probably wouldn't have happened either.
In the end it isn't the horrid UI of GNOME3 that scares the crap out of so many of us mortal users, it is the corrosive attitude radiating from the GNOME camp, exemplified by the article under discussion here. They don't care if we don't like it. Because they know better what we should want and are intent on 'giving' it to us if they have to come to our house and ram it down our throats. Because they are convinced they are RIGHT and will of course eventually learn to love it and admit we were wrong.
I can make the quite reasonable (to me at least) argument that there is no way I could deploy GNOME3 in a public lab because the same users who almost instantly know how to use GNOME2 wouldn't have a clue what to do with GNOME3. And they don''t care. I could try to migrate to something else but what? KDE is also pretty weird (but pretty and actually usable with user training) these days, I can wrangle XFCE into shape for my own use but it isn't ready for the general public. The small fry desktop environments are oriented for UNIX heads or embedded (Enlightenment). Unify is as bad as GNOME. So what is left? Stay on RHEL6/Fedora14/Ubuntu10.04 for the forseeable future and eventualy declare Linux a dead end when hardware support peters out? Migrate to Windows? What is the official suggestion? Come on GNOMEs, lets hear it.