There's a lot of major open source projects that have gone stupid over the past year or two. Firefox is the other big one, of course. But we've seen similar stupidity from Thunderbird and Ubuntu, for instance.

It's like a big mass of unemployed web designers have moved on to fucking up real applications, perhaps because nobody will hire them to do web development any more, given similar fuck-ups in the past.

No, we don't want gradients and curved corners all over the place. No, we don't want the menus to be removed. No, we don't want the status bar to be hidden. We just want software that works, and these failed designers just can't provide that!

Sure, they're good in theory, but after you've been using some extension for years the Gnome developers decide that they want Change and then your extension breaks and the developer hasn't updated it in a long time because it's done and there's really no way to improve it, and now it's dead unless someone else learns whatever arcane Gnome-isms are required to fix it.

Users simply can't rely on anything outside the main code development tree, and with Gnome you can't even rely on that.

No, it's not a problem at all. The problem is the fallacy that in order to make a UI that appeals to new users you must automatically get rid of everything that your old users liked about the original. You CAN have both, just bury the option to switch somewhere that only the old power users will find and you're fine.

thats why linux values freedom of choice most of all. If you don't like it, switch and quit your bitchen. try fluxbox or Awsome. The gnome expatriate DE of choice has been XFCE but i think theres a branch of metacity being mantained like there's a kde3 branch being maintained

I really hate this retort. A lot of people used GNOME 2 because it was the best at what it did. Either KDE was too complicated (too many options/controls) or XFCE was too lean (lacking in functionality). GNOME 2 had a nice middle-ground. With GNOME 3 fucking up things, we have a problem. We can stick with GNOME 2 until it falls into disrepair (which does happen when libraries are upgraded but the DE is not), or we can switch to something like MATE which is still in development.

The problem with the argument of how Linux provides options is that they aren't necessarily any good. People generally use one DE over another because it provides something the others don't. If the development direction of said DE makes it no longer desirable, all the freedom of choice doesn't help much if now ALL of your options are lackluster as opposed to all but one.

See, that doesn't bother me a bit. The only thing I use that type of facility for is High Frequency items, email, browser, file manager, command shells. If one of those is ALREADY open I want the open one 99.94444% of the time, and if I want a new one, its left click.

You keep most menu items in the start-bar menu / what ever you want to call it. But the high frequency items I want handy, and If they are running already chances are I want the running one, and not another one.

It may not be to your liking, but it is very well thought out in all the implementations I've see of something like that. Why dig thru application menus? Computers are supposed to be intuitive. See icon, click Icon, get the desired result. They are not two completely different things. Its the way people work.

WTF?!? Activities in Plasma Desktop were never ever forced on anyone. Everybody who doesn't want them simply doesn't use them.

I'll get modded worse but this is something I feel I HAVE to ask: Wasn't Linux supposed to be the "sensible" one? the one where you didn't have code just being chunked because of some new shiny? I mean here you had KDE 3 and GNOME 2, both had been battle tested, were rock solid, were certainly not ugly on the eyes, had tons of features and were getting pretty damned bug free, so what happened? Did MSFT going bling happy force everyone to be blinded by the shiny?

I swear the whole Linux situation reminds me of an old SNL skit about Bizarro world. its like "Quick users am happy and things am stable! This is no good, we must throw everything out and break lots of stuff! Now look, users am unhappy and things broken, all better now" WTF?

I don't know, maybe its all Canonical's fault as they seem to be the ones that really started doing Bizarro shit like 6 month releases and seeming to go out of their way to piss of their users. When I first tried Linux in 2004 I thought that by now me and every other retailer in America would have penguins on boxes and Linux PCs and laptops right beside the Windows and Mac machines. progress was slow but steady, every year things got better, drivers got a little more stable, things got less fiddly, it really looked to be coming along nicely.

Now it just seems more like politics and fanboyism, where every request or critique is treating like pissing on the bible, things seem a hell of a lot more unstable and all that progress seems to have been thrown right out the window into the path of a bus. I have tried damned near every "user friendly" distro I have ever heard of and can't get a single one to pass my "is it safe?" test which simulates my customer having the PC and just keeping it updated for 3 years, not a single one. Drivers break, DEs get swapped out, UIs get flaky, and when i point this out all I get is heaps of insults and accused of being one of THEM whoever the THEM is this week.

I just think its a damned shame, that's what it is. When XP goes EOL there will be literally tens of millions of machines with frankly overpowered hardware that COULD be running Linux and offering low cost computing to the masses and instead me and every other system builder and repair guy will be scrambling for cheap Win 7 Starter and Home CALs simply because nobody will listen to us and give us a simple, easy to use, fiddly free Linux that Suzy the checkout girl can run without picking up "Bash and scripting for dummies". Is that REALLY so much to ask?

I repeat: ...the FALLACY that in order to make a UI that appeals to new users you MUST automatically get rid...

Do you think they would've been doing worse if they'd still gone to windows 95 but kept the powerful features available for when people needed/wanted them?

It's funny how all this GNOME 3 flaming happens in the comments of a newsitem that basically is about the solution to one of the main gripes people are (rightfully, to an extent) complaining about. GNOME 3 extensions can basically turn the whole thing back to like how GNOME 2 worked, if that's how you preferred it. Many power user extensions are out there, and very likely now that GNOME 3 has most distributions it wouldn't surprise me of many many new extensions popup filling every possible niche. What's more, it's fairly straightforward to create your own, if you know some CSS/JS (which are pretty easy to pick up anyway). GNOME 3 may have stripped out a lot of stuff, and for sure I defiintely felt lost for a while after switching to GNOME 3, but it put in place a very nice extension system that easily makes up for it, if you ask me.

The only thing that still bothers me is GNOME 3's heavy dependance on accelerated 3D graphics, given that Linux GPU drivers are generally in such a poor state (improving, but still..), and because somehow, despite today's GPU's power, things still feel more sluggish than they did in GNOME 2