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.'"
I'll say it! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2."
GNOME 3 is *worse* than GNOME 2. By far. Plus more.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Insightful)
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything.
Mod up. The purpose of a DE is to enable the user to get his work done as fast and as efficiently as possible. Not eye-candy bullshit. If you can imlement eye candy that doesn't hinder or get in the way, I'm all for that, but never forget: **Enable the user to get work done fast**
chasing the "dumb it down" crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
The big issue with many modern desktops including Gnome and Win8 is they are hell bent on chasing the "dumb it down! dumb it all down! moaarrr dumber!!" crowd. Ripping out power user functionality, removing configurability, and generally making it about as annoying to use for proficient users as possible.
There aren't many "real" desktops left. KDE is left. Some like it, some don't, but at least it hasn't dumbed itself down to placate the LCD who think computers shouldn't be any more complex than operating a toaster. Win7 is alright. Most of the others have gone off the deep end in their quest to satisfy people who need the most simplistic interface possible at the expense of power features and customization.
I have seen the abyss... (Score:5, Insightful)
...and I like it.
TFA seems to be describing a mature software project that has entered maintenance mode. Why would this be a bad thing?
TFA says, "Distros are dropping GNOME for other environments instead of working with GNOME," with "other" and "environments" hyperlinked to Unity and Cinnamon. Actually, aren't these projects that share a ton of code with GNOME? So what's the problem? Users have a bunch of different choices. The developers offering these choices are sharing code. Users who prefer something outside this family of choices, such as KDE or Fluxbox or XFCE, can also do their own thing. This is also good. All the same apps run just fine in all these different environments. This is also good.
TFA says, "The claimed target users for GNOME are leaving desktop computers behind for types of devices GNOME doesn't work on," with hyperlinks referring to smartphones and tablet computers. Again, I don't see the problem. Users have other choices besides keyboard-and-mouse computers. I kind of doubt that anyone is choosing to use a smartphone to write their novel, so maybe users are actually using the correct tool for the correct job: desktops for the jobs that desktops are good for, smartphones for the jobs that smartphones are good for. Once again, what's the problem?
Missing the point of a DE... (Score:3, Insightful)
GNOME was badly managed for years, but it was tolerable until GNOME 3.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't "fix" what is broken, especially when it is a basic part of the system.
Desktop Environment Fad is finally ending. (Score:5, Insightful)
I never quite understood the attraction. What exactly is this whole GNOME or KDE package for? Granted, there are some decent programs that came with them, but do they really require all the extra baggage of 10 layers of crappy libraries with fancy names? Both KDE and GNOME are just pointless empire building exercises by bunch of people who want to force their way of computer interaction on everyone else.
The OS should do one thing, provide services to programs. On UI level that includes managing windows and provide some way of task switching. Widget library is nice too since it saves some time for programmers, but it doesn't really have to be part of OS. On Windows this functionality is pretty much built in to the point of being (almost) non replaceable. Thankfully on Unix one has a choice of window manager, task switchers/panels, widget libraries etc. The users should be able to mix and match them to fulfill their needs. Some distros like Ubuntu may make these choices for the users that do not care much what they use. Where do mega projects "we gonna takeover your computer and make you do things our way" like GNOME and KDE fit? Nowhere, and finally people realize that.
The only thing that can be done with these projects is to salvage any good apps they have created and make them into independent projects. There is less and less to salvage though because GNOME managed to create dumber and dumber versions of the same things (like image viewers or browsers or file managers etc).
For instance, why would anyone ever use web browsers that GNOME has created (is the latest one Epiphany or something?) when there is Firefox, Chrome or Seamonkey made by people who know what they are doing?
There are some nice projects like LXDE, and to lesser degree XFCE which are actually helpful, they put together bunch of tools, most of them optional, and give you quite a lot of choice. Although XFCE is getting fatter and fatter.
Mate aint bad - Gnome3 is (Score:3, Insightful)
Gnome 3 is the Digg v.4 of Desktops. (Score:2, Insightful)
Gnome is one of those things where everybody can clearly point at the exact moment it became a fucking mess.
Gnome 3 turned me into a KDE user. KDE has it's own problems, but not like Gnome.
Wait, GNOME3 is actually nice (Score:1, Insightful)
I use it, most of my coworkers use it. Sure, the linux desktop is in crisis, but actually, it always was if you wanted something more than a simple xfce. KDE 1.x was a PITA for over a year too long with KDE 2's delays. GNOME 2.x always seemed like taking Apple's idea of designing for minimal user choice, just without having Apple's designers. But for some time KDE3 and GNOME2 provided stable work environments, yet always lacking some (less or more) usability, design and ergonomics. Unfortunately I have never managed to set up a KDE4 environment that would not barf after several logins. Something similar happens with Unity, works works works, and then gradually some things stop working.
And GNOME3 is different, it is probably the only stable desktop environment that is more sophisticated than xfce.
I didn't abandon Gnome, Gnome abandoned me. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wrote a couple of major apps under Gnome/Gtk 1 and put them up on Sourceforge. I packaged them for RH7 and Ubuntu 6.
Gnome 2 came out, breaking both binary AND source compatibility. The new interfaces were baroque and I just didn't have the time to learn them.
Ubuntu 8 renamed a key package and now my Ubuntu 6 .deb files no longer installed.
Ubuntu 9 dropped support for Gnome/Gtk 1 completely.
The only question that remains now is: port to QT or go the whole nine yards and port the app to Java/Swing?
Re:To go against the crowd... (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but please turn me on to your weed supplier because you are smoking some really good stuff. I wish I was hallucinating like that.
Re:chasing the "dumb it down" crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
The big issue with many modern desktops including Gnome and Win8 is they are hell bent on chasing the "dumb it down! dumb it all down! moaarrr dumber!!" crowd. Ripping out power user functionality, removing configurability, and generally making it about as annoying to use for proficient users as possible.
For some reason stagnation is expected in computing, even when this is rare elsewhere. I call them "permanant noobs".
When you got your first bicycle and used it with training wheels, no one expected that you would still use those training wheels years later. When you got your learner's permit, it was expected that this was a stepping stone you would use to ultimatley gain enough skill to get your own proper driver's license. No one actually expected that these early learning stages would or should be permanent.
The "dumb it down" mentality with computing is the assumption that the early learning stages should be sanctified and made permanent, that they are some kind of perfect ideal, that it's not reasonable to ever expect a user's skill to grow with time. Sure, some users have more aptitude than others, some learn faster than others, but the "dumb it down" idea throws all of that out and assumes no one should ever learn anything.
It's like anything else. It grows if you feed it. It shrinks if you starve it. The constant feeding of it in mainstream thought has led to users who can operate a computer for 5+ years and still know nothing more about it than when they started. They get frustrated at the same problems that frustrated them five years ago because they have not learned anything. They demand overly-simplified interfaces and balk at the slightest investment of learning (and even then, nothing major, just paying attention and picking up facts here and there with experience would make a big difference).
It's standard penny-wise, dollar-stupid thinking. It's saving a slight effort in the short term in order to screw oneself in the long term. An intermediate user with an interface that presents the available options in an intelligent way has a much better experience than any user with an interface built on the assumption that you're an idiot. But the concept of making an investment is alien to this mentality. It's by no means limited to computing. You see it in corporations all the time, where everything is all about this quarter's earnings even when this leads to long-term sustainability problems.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Insightful)
KDE, or Kwin to be more accurate, would allow you to do that and more. It's their killer feature for me.
The care and feeding of trolls (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't feed the troll. They feed on your sense of outrage. And that one isn't even very skilled... doing it as an AC is so lame. That guy would have to study and try a lot harder just to make it up to the GNAA's low standards.
At least when I decide to go atrolling I try to at least launch some good threads with it. After all, karma doesn't accumulate much beyond excellent and I can bounce from terrible back to excellent in short enough order. :) Why not be a prankster once in a while?
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I run Gnome 3 on my Fedora 17 box and Cinnamon 1.4 on my Mint 13 box. Both desktops are new and there are a few rough edges, but I enjoy using both. Remember, we are Linux guys (and gals), we are supposed to work around the edges, tweak stuff, and stuff, goes with the territory ..:P
My two bits
Gnome project IS on its deathbed (Score:2, Insightful)
Because GNOME has always been about being against something rather than for something. That kind of unfocused institutional angst is difficult to sustain.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the gnome shell (and I was previously a gnome 2 user). It was originally (years ago) very buggy and flaky, but now it works quite well, and is actually very nice ... nicer, I think, than the er, "classic" style panel. It keeps out of my way more, and is easier and quicker to use when I need it.
People are often quite conservative when it comes to a familiar environment, and will react negatively to any change, and I think regardless of any merits, it was inevitable that there would be a lot of moaning about a change as drastic as you see in gnome 3. On the other hand, it's really quite nice to see somebody actually trying out new ideas instead of just blindly sticking with the same creaky old stuff, which was hardly perfect, even if it had the benefit of familiarity.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:4, Insightful)
The problems at Gnome are common across much of GNU/Linux these days. I tried as hard as I could, yet failed to get Gnome GTK+ guys to accept (or offer an alternative) an accessibility patch fairly critical to the blind community (allowing icons to have verbal descriptions). It's possible to work with the Debian guys, but unless one of their inner circle is interested in your specific project, you've got no way to reach all the Debian users who want to use what you have to offer. This is partly why Google has 600K apps and Debian has 30K packages. If I want to reach Android geeks, I can be published by next week, and the only real challenge is being noticed among those other 600K apps.
What Linux needs is a rewrite of dpkg, just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion. This concept of upstream golden source is BS. What we need is distributed git-style repositories, where users can easily point their machines to the upstream branch/fork of their choice. That way, if I'm in my favorite distro and I hate this new desktop manager, I just point to the branch/fork maintained by people I consider more sensible. Machines shouldn't be GNU/Linux boxes. They should be bare metal Linux boxes, and groups like Ubuntu should just be famous repository managers who get so much right for most users, that lazy geeks like me put them first in my list of distributed repositories. But when Fedora has a better package, or a better version, I should be free to pull that specific part from them, and have it work with all the stuff I pull from Ubuntu.
NOT impossible. Only pie in the sky because of the lack of will to move forward in the calcified GNU/Linux community.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess my suggestion that the current system is screwed up didn't make you happy. Well, it's screwed up, and I'm sorry about hurting feelings.
The PPA system is great. I used it extensively. It's a bandaid, not a solution. If I want to pull my upstream Gnome packages from a fork of Gnome, good luck making that work with existing pre-compiled Ubuntu binaries. It's simply not possible, not with a custom PPA and a month of compiling 100 custom packages (which no one will be crazy enough to use, because they just want your Gnome hacks, not a new distro), and certainly not with editing your sources.list. The problems are fundamental design decisions made in the early 90's, which were made well for the time, but now are destroying the GNU/Linux community.
The reason this is pie in the sky is guys like you will bury the message, and most people will never understand the problem, or the potential solution. Dpkg is subversion. We need git.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Insightful)
What you seem to want really isn't posible. You can't just mix and match in one part of a major subsystem and you certainly can't mix Debian and Fedora packages beyond the very end user applications that have no connections into the different plumbing that seperates the two trees of development and that basically static link everything.
You seem enamoured with the Android package system without undertanding it. Android packages work because they are very restricted in what they can do. For example, they must be Java; that means they cannot alter any of the system level components. So replacing part of GNOME would be like replacing the native binary parts of Android, which an .apk can't attempt. They also work because there is only one Android line and it is carefully kept backward compatible. While Linux distros can upgrade from one major version to another entirely via the package system you could never upgrade from Android 2.2 to 2.3 via the Play Store. The OS components involved simply aren't part of the package manager on Android. The kernel on most devices isn't even in a file.
Every few weeks some kid shows up on a Linux forum demanding that we rebuild everything to support a binary only cross distro 'app' model. Usually with notes about how much more successful Windows or OS X is and attributing that success to this binary model. Not happening. The reason we have different distros is because they aren't all alike except for the package manager, each is trying new things. If a consensus emerges that one has really done something right the others of course adopt it but there is no central planner and we don't want one. Good luck convincing a Gentoo ricer to adopt binary packaging and a strict binary API. Systemd or sysV init? PulseAudio, ALSA, ESD, ARTS or OSS?
Feel free to create yet another distro and show us all how it should be done, that is of course where the existing ones came from. And maybe you will succeed in attracting a following and eventually some of your ideas will migrate.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:2, Insightful)
This slashdot thread is about a major problem which by itself is a major blow to Linux. Obviously, you think everything is just fine, and always will be. If my tone sounds harsh, it's not you, its just the hordes of clones like you that in the end will insure no real change happens that saddens me.
GNU/Linux true believers are incapable of seeing that GNU/Linux is dying, so we should probably not try to talk rationally about it. I've put an insane number of hours into open source GNU/Linux stuff, so seeing it failing hurts me personally. Debian-multimedia? Really? So... you're going to switch your Gnome desktop like Linus wants to [zdnet.com], perhaps you will use debian-multimedia to install the latest and greatest Gnome fork, Cinnamon? [h-online.com] No, you wont, because it's not possible, but I wont be able to convince you that you couldn't trivially use debian-multimedia to do it. Math like Android's 600K packages vs Debian's 30K packages mean nothing to you. 590K of them are total crap, right? One week to publish to millions of users in Windows or Android versus years in Debian are a mere annoyance, and you prefer the exceptional quality control in Debian on those 30K packages, to any 600K repository of crap. If software authors object to having to rewrite every package for every distro, and having to negotiate with each distro separately for a package to be accepted, it's their problem, right? The top games aren't available on Linux because of the stupidity of the game industry, right?
GNU/Linux is dying, and as much as I'd like to help fix that, true believers in the ancient ways vastly outnumber those of us with enough software design sense to see that GNU/Linux has to change. The year of Linux on the desktop is 2013! Ignore the nay-sayers like me. We're ignorant morons. A million lines of production code I wrote currently in use by customers around the world contributed nothing to my understanding of anything. Hacking Vinux, speech DSP algorithms, and text-to-speech are child's play (the stuff I do for free to benefit GNU/Linx). It's only for the stupid. 26 years of building software, 22 patents, tech lead at one company that went IPO, early contributor to another IPO, and founder of yet another company I sold last year just means I have no clue. Guys like us are simply ignorant, and will be ignored by the vast majority of true believers. That's why Linux is dying.
With a redesign of the package managers to work as a peer-to-peer distributed repository system built on a web of trust, with the pre-compiled binaries you need to run your system the way you want to, GNU/Linux could be the next big thing (or at least bigger than now). It's actually quite involved and given how well you're picking up the whole "git" rewrite of "dpkg", I'll just assume you're not getting it. Actually, you're probably super smart, but simply refuse to believe that the existing GNU/Linux system is not already delivering anything I could possibly be talking about.
This fracturing of the tiny Linux market into Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc and Gnome2/Gnome3/Unity/Cinnamon is just healthy growing pains, right? All this choice is a good thing, and your switching to KDE is just part of what makes GNU/Linxu so great! Gosh I'm glad I get good quality packages from this vibrant innovative community!
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to open something? Press the Win key, type a name, press enter. Viola - I now have (Insert application here) looking at me.
Well, we're all very happy for you that you either use so few applications or have a steel-trap memory enabling you to remember the names of all the programs you've installed.
There's something to be said for discoverability. But hey, we wouldn't want to clutter your dedicated clock bar.
Re:chasing the "dumb it down" crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
Well put.
I have a theory for this based on my observations of older computer users, especially those that started in the DOS era.
Back in those days, two things were significantly different to now:
1) Software came with printed manuals written in a "tutorial" style. These days, most software comes with electronic help files at best, usually written in a "reference" style with no theory or explanations.
2) A few very popular products at the time like Norton Disk Doctor had a radically different UI style that actually explained things, and this helped people learn as they went.
I remember my father reading through the Corel Draw manual end-to-end, and he ended up learning how to use it completely. He's not a graphic artist by any means, but I've seen him develop fantastically complex multi-layer vector art for use in embedding in documents back when DOS 6 was new. These days, I'm shocked when I see vector art in a Word document. It just doesn't happen because it's "too complex" for most users, even though vector drawing programs have gotten better and easier to use!
It's the second one that I'd like to see make a come-back the most. Norton at the time was a fanstastic product, because its author realized that everyone else was doing UI design wrong. Nobody has picked up on his insight, and everybody still does it wrong.
Ask yourself this: How many times have you seen a dialox box pop up on the screen demanding an immediate response to a scary question with no explanation? Things like:
This could damage your system! Are you sure? Yes or No?
Think about it for a second. How is the poor user expected to respond to this? What the fuck is "this"? What kind of "damage"? Should he press "yes"? Or "no"? Why? Why not? On what basis should he decide?
Practically all software is like this. Operating systems like Windows literally barrage users with prompts that are exactly like that, dozens of times a day. The prompts never give any useful information, even for Administrators, let alone a non-technical user. Users learn only to click "OK" to everything and pray. No understanding is gained.
For comparison, Norton Disk Doctor had full screen dialog boxes with paragraphs of text explaining things like:
- What triggered this message
- A detailed explanation of what the question means
- What will happen if you press 'yes'
- What will happen if you press 'no'
- The risk to your data for both cases
I saw users who were still at the stage where they could only type with one finger confidently making complex technical decisions because they were informed. The explanations thought them something, and they learned, and got better at using computers.
I haven't seen a product like that since, by any vendor. Coupled with the combination of manuals becoming a rarity, it's no surprise that users aren't learning anything.
Re:Reason? GNOME3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure). Now doing that would be bad in general, but if you instead run chrooted in a jail, like recently has been done in Ubuntu, and use hard-links to share the various .so files, you can get disk utilization under control. In my experience, .so files don't fill up much disk anyway, so if I have 2 or 3 versions of most .so files, shared across the various apps that use them, it should not be a big problem.
You, sir, are an idiot.
$100K software is distributed that way because developers can't allow external maintainers touch their source code, and are unwilling to do distribution-specific builds themselves. Their "special" libraries crowd up memory because they are not shared with the rest of the system -- you end up with two copies Qt, two copies of MySQL client, two JREs, and dreaded two libstdc++'es that caused so much grief in 90's. They often use obsolete protocols and don't work properly with other components -- what is usually just fine for EDA or CAD program, but stupid for anything else.
Well, it was you who told us to fuck off. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear remaining GNOME devs,
You guys said “If you don’t like GNOME 3, don’t use it.”
So we took you at your word.
The CADT [jwz.org] development model remains predominant in GNOME: throwing everything away and writing something new is always much more fun (and better for the resume) than just fixing the remaining bugs in something that basically works.
I'm a Unix sysadmin for a living. I just reinstalled my work box with Xubuntu 12.04. It's amazingly responsive and the interface doesn't make me want to set it on fucking fire. I can GET SHIT DONE AT WORK.
I didn’t leave GNOME, it left me.