Linux Mint Developer Forks Gnome 3 314
An anonymous reader writes "Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, has forked Gnome 3 and named it Cinnamon. Mint has experimented with extensions to Gnome in the latest release of their operating system, but in order to make the experience they are aiming for really work, they needed an actual fork. The goal of this fork is to use the improved Gnome 3 internals and put a more familiar Gnome 2 interface on it."
Re:Long-Term? (Score:5, Informative)
The goal of this fork is to use the improved Gnome 3 internals and put a more familiar Gnome 2 interface on it.
TFA actually says that it is a fork of the Gnome shell rather than the entirety of Gnome. Presumably, it would be built against and installed along with the official libraries and applications. Just a single component being replaced; a bit like changing the default browser to Firefox.
Re:Long-Term? (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike what the summary suggests, it's not a Gnome 3 fork but just a Gnome Shell fork. With the whole back end untouched, they should be able to keep compatibility issues to a minimum.
Re:Keep away the UI "designers"! (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox (unlike Chrome) still has options and addons to undo just about all the fucked-up changes, but yeah, the new defaults are stupid, and Gnome3 as intro'ed is just stupid through and through. You can take all these UI self-appointed experts and give them a boot in the ass.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:5, Informative)
You've made a number of unsupported assertions there. And of course since you talk as if you know what you are talking about you've been modded up.
I can't disagree with your take on the politics. I do take issue with the technology. Gnome certainly has had problems with being over-designed and over-abstracted. And I won't argue with your assertion about stupid UI choices.
Compiling Gnome, though, is pretty easy using but time consuming using jhbuild. Most users of course aren't affected in the least by the build process. Qt's build process is self-contained, but takes hours still. The end result is really the same for end users. Having every widget toolkit re-implement every wheel is fairly tiresome. Why not use lower-level libraries like libxml that already work well, and most importantly, are C-based.
As for the language, basing it on C was a wise choice. It's a far more portable language than C++ or Objective C, and *way* easier to bind other languages too. The GObject model works very well in other languages. Programming GTK+ in C++ is a joy (doesn't need moc either). GTK+ in Python is slick too, and actually manages to be fairly pythonic, unlike PyQt, which is really just C++ code in a python syntax.
Writing new GObject code is a chore, since there's a lot of boilerplate code to implement vtables, etc, but using GObject apis in regular C code is quite easy. I don't think Gobject is a BS OO extension anymore than C++ is. Functionally and under the hood they are fairly equivalent. No language support is a pain, but Vala is nice for providing that. I basically consume GObject code in other languages, and there has never been any issue there.
The tl;dr version of this post is that when you say that Gnome has made every mistake possible and that C and Gobject are responsible for Gnome being in a sorry state strikes me as being a rather baseless claim.
Re:Keep away the UI "designers"! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one... (Score:5, Informative)
There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2.
There's Gnome Virtual File System (gvfs), which IMHO is the second worst decision the Gnome people ever did (the Gnome Shell iPad fanboi UI being the worst).
When the superuser can't access all files on a system, something is worng. Backup programs and automated root "find" commands fail because of ~loggedinuser/.gvfs which they can't access. Good job. And no, it's not all the other well established tools that should change to accommodate gnome. It's gnome being stupid and breaking things.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:4, Informative)
There was a project to make an LGPL QT clone called Harmony. It didn't attract a ton of developers. Strategically the FSF (and Harmony was on board) was that the desktop needed to go first. Otherwise, Harmony would be chasing Trolltech and the free Harmony based desktop would be years behind the proprietary QT based desktop. The free version would be a poor quality knock off of the original.
That is essentially the situation that GnuSTEP has always found themselves in. They can't lead they have to follow.
So yes, what you are proposing was in fact what they were doing.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:4, Informative)
Selecting a single coherent user interface experience as the default makes a lot of sense. Blocking users from changing the settings makes no sense, especially for an open source project.