GNOME: Staring Into the Abyss 535
New submitter zixxt writes "GTK+ Developer Benjamin Otte talks about the stagnation and decline of the Gnome Project. He describes how core developers are leaving GNOME development, how GNOME is understaffed, why GNOME is a Red Hat project and why GNOME is losing market and mind share. Is the Gnome project on its deathbed? Quoting: 'I first noticed this in 2005 when Jeff Waugh gave his 10×10 talk. Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project. In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places.'"
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:2, Informative)
MATE (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to keep using GNOME2, I suggest using MATE [mate-desktop.org]. It's basically a renamed GNOME2 fork.
Re:chasing the "dumb it down" crowd (Score:5, Informative)
XFCE is still around and became my desktop after Gnome2 support was dropped on Arch Linux.
Linux Mint also has Cinnamon.
Re:Missing the point of a DE... (Score:5, Informative)
It beats me why developers of alternate desktops feel the need to repeat the worst mistakes of the market leaders.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:2, Informative)
When some of my classmates who have never touched another OS ask me for a recommendation on a Linux distro, I've always recommended Xubuntu ever since Unity came. XFCE is just very useable and customize.
I use Gnome 3.4 every day and would never go back (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:GNOME 3 is worse than GNOME 2! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a hint. It is one of the strengths of Linux from a certain way of looking at it.
Attaching and detaching a display from a laptop is something no DE is ever going to make 'just work' for everyone. You use case might sometimes be just what the developer was thinking, others you will lose. On the 'other' platforms you just live with it, we have options. On my laptop the F7 key is silkscreened with display/panel in blue, meaning Fn+F7 is the approved way and what would work on the 'other' OS. So to make it easy to remember I bound CTRL-F7 to a script.
It examines the state of the dock and doesn't try to 'do the right thing' for anyone and everyone, it does exactly what [I] want for either state. With only a little more work (when I get a spare round tuit) I'll extend it to look at the VGA port and deal with the presence of a projector automagically. Yes I means I have to hit a hot key when the automatics do the wrong thing (almost every time) but it means I always get what I want and it beats filing bug reports that get closed WONTFIX when the distro goes out of support and just bitching about it being broken.
#!/bin/bash
BUSDOCK=/sys/bus/platform/devices/dock.0/
DOCKED=`cat ${BUSDOCK}/docked`
if [ "$DOCKED" == 1 ] ; then
echo "Docked"
xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --mode 1024x768 --rotate normal --pos 0x0 --primary --output VGA1 --off
sleep 2
xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --rotate normal --pos 0x0 --primary \
--output LVDS1 --auto --right-of HDMI2 --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect"
fi
if [ "$DOCKED" == 0 ] ; then
echo "Undocked"
xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --mode 1024x768 --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect" \
--primary --output HDMI2 --off --output VGA1 --off
sleep 2
xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect" --primary
fi
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:4, Informative)
You certainly can you move your cursor to other windows to click on them, give them focus and raise them. Heck you can even do focus follows mouse, and autoraise, getting rid of the click.
Secondly, you don't have to click the word "Activities" at all. It's a hot corner. You're supposed shoot your mouse to it quickly. And the beauty of the hot corner is, you don't have to look for it or locate it on the screen, you don't have to aim for it or click it - you just whip your cursor up to it in a fast, imprecise motion - and voila - you have the overview. The targets there are also large, so you can don't have to be precise.
Or you can leave your left hand on the keyboard to hit the super-key...
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Informative)
New stuff is find. New stuff is great. New stuff is not the problem.
Throwing away or breaking the old stuff is the problem.
Re:Desktop Environment Fad is finally ending. (Score:5, Informative)
"LXDE, and to lesser degree XFCE"
really? LXDE cant even set a clock without going into regular expressions, or put a trash can on your desktop without editing text files, XFCE is the non broken version of LXDE from a users perspective
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, that's all already the case.
You just run your own PPA or apt repository if you don't want to play by the distro's rules about getting into their repos. Then if people want your software they can add it. And it is incredibly easy through the various frontends or by editing sources.list directly.
Google do this for chrome, debian-multimedia for this for their extra codec offerings, skype have a debian repo.
It's not pie in the sky, the only barrier to this is your own incompetence and ignorance, which you seem quite intent on displaying here.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:4, Informative)
So why use a GUI?
Because, like GUIs, non sequiturs can be informative, right up 'till when the goldfish die.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Informative)
just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion
Git was never intended as a replacement for Subversion. From the way that Torvalds talked about Subversion, I doubt he ever even used it. Git was a replacement for BitKeeper - which worked on a distributed-repository model, just like Git.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:4, Informative)
How exactly is KDE4 unusable? Yes, the early versions really were unusable, but the recent versions (anything after 4.6) have been pretty decent. 4.8 is looking pretty good in fact.