Designer Jon McCann: "More Optimistic About GNOME Than In a Long Time" 235
An anonymous reader writes "In an extensive interview with derStandard.at, GNOME designer Jon McCann shares his thoughts about all the criticism GNOME 3 currently faces and why he doesn't think at all that GNOME is in a crisis. He also talks about the current plans for GNOME OS and explains why he thinks that Linux distributions should rethink their purpose."
Re:Oh what a fucking surprise... (Score:3, Insightful)
yeah I kind of thought the same....we have a critisism that says "the gnome leadership doesn't listen to it's users" and it's users saying "wtf, I can't select the font size???", etc, etc, etc.
then you have an article by one of the gnome team says he's "super confident" about the project.
doesn't that kind of explain everything, in perfect clarity.....and prove the point beyond doubt that the gnome leadership don't in fact listen....
That is too bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Gnome 3 is a complete mess. and it's UI is not easier to use or more intuitive, its just trendy and "different" It is 5 years behind Gnome 2.x in usability and polish. A lot of the criticism for Gnome 3 is justified. The problem is knowing how the Gnome team works, they will ignore everyone and do what they want.
I have tried several times to use it and every time the same parts fall down. Luckily some smart people are picking up the abandoned 2.x line and forked it. So linux will continue to have a useable desktop instead of the wierd social experiments that are Gnome 3 and Unity.
Unity (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No, seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
The ostensible forks Cinammon and Mate and other re-works of gnome weren't done for fun and giggles. It's because lots of gnome 2.x users frankly thought that gnome 3 had a touch of hubris and the sort of ugliness that only "visionaries" can bring.
Linus has great points, but before he laid in on the problem, lots of us complained to deaf ears. And we moved on.
Options are a good thing (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That is too bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is still KDE SC (try it), LXDE, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, etc. It is still useable. GNOME 3 and Unity are "oddities" we should ignore just as much as Windows 8.
Well that confirms it (Score:5, Insightful)
The GNOME people aren't listening. They thought when they had something people were happy and comfortable with that they "lacked direction" so they got together and decided on a direction. So once they got to a point where people were happy and comfortable, they somehow thought it meant it was time for change.
I think this is where the problem has begun. In my mind there are few acceptable reasons for change:
1. A brick wall has been hit while going one direction and the previous goal is not achievable
2. A crisis of compatibility or usability has occurred where the current way of doing things is no longer acceptable, applicable or useful
3. People are moving away from GNOME because something better has their attention
4. People are moving away from GNOME because the development team isn't responding to them
There may be more, but those are just the first few that occur to me. Of those only #4 is applicable and that is only because they decided to change and not listen to the people using GNOME. They caused #4 and persist in it.
GNOME developers are completely out of touch. They created change for the sake of change and that is a very bad reason for change when people are depending on keeping things as they are.
The article/interview parallels what GNOME has done with Mac OSX and Windows. Mac OSX changes were... not completely necessary but also not completely alienating to the user from an interface standpoint. Microsoft's changes are perfect examples of end user rejection and how the users affect the marketplace. Shame on you, GNOME team, for not noticing this. No one has accepted Vista. Windows 7 has been accepted because there is no more Windows XP. And Windows 8? Developers are shying away from developing for it. Microsoft at least acknowledges that it is screwing up and has reversed some of the things that have offended developers with regard to Windows 8. We see none of that from GNOME... yet...
Re:No, seriously (Score:2, Insightful)
Bullshit, you've obviously never used Gnome 3.
The mantra of the butthurt Unity/Metro/GNOME 3 fanbois. I hate to break it to you, but people actually have used GNOME 3 and despite you thinking its the greatest thing ever, other people can actually be allowed to disagree. And no it's not because these same people are "resistant to change".
You want to make a successful UI? Clone Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Or hellz, XP.
Make it look and work as close as possible, out of the box. No dicking around, no "Yehbut, we can improve it just a little bit here, maybe a dab there, a sprinkling over that wa- ah, we'll fix that in the next version".
My wife will use it. My mother will use it. My employer might even take a look at it.
Stop with your new paradigm fantasies. The desktop isn't broke (until Windows 8). Quit trying to fix it.
The real Gnome 3 problem (Score:5, Insightful)
For years, using Linux was something for the advanced users who enjoyed having to dig deep on occasion to make it all work. Then along came Ubuntu and turned the Linux desktop into something that was REALLY a lot easier to install, use and maintain then Windows and yes, even Mac. Can either of those two run from a CD with full access to the HD if something goes tits up? Do either of them have a full desktop available with browser and everything else during install?
Finally, Linux the desktop. WORKED.
And then the Gnome 3 team said "nah, it doesn't, we know better how you should work". And they released a badly tested, badly thought out and badly documented product way to early and with no training to get people used to the new interface or any motivation for wanting to get used to the new interface.
It is like me forcing you to sit upside down on the toilet, with no training or handy handholds all for the pleasure of crapping on your face. Whatever secret benefit it might give, you are not going to be in the mood to find out right?
It is the same with Windows Metro. WHAT IS IT SUPPOSED TO FIX? What was missing in the classic desktop user design that is being fixed in by either Unity, Gnome 3 or Metro?
People are perfectly willing to change for a well known UI if there is a really good reason to do so. Who here still uses rotary dialing on their phone? Touch keys WERE a massive improvement, not just more accurate but also less stressful on your finger if had to dial a lot. The mobile phones and indeed the rise of OSX has shown that people are not stuck to the classic desktop, as MS thought judging by their early attempts at a phone OS.
But for the desktop, the desktop design, just works well enough. Gnome 3 made its introduction even worse by not being very well put together and doing it while things like Nautilus were still horrid pieces of buggy crash prone slow as molasses software. They then threw out all the good bits all the improvements others had made to make Gnome 2.0 workable and made something nobody wanted instead.
But all is good. Hello? You have been ditched left and right by distro's. Mint rose as a distro from nothing just because they offered people non-gnome3 despite their insistence of screwing up google searches.
The Iraqi minister of looking silly couldn't do a better job of dis-information. Gnome 3.0 has not been ditched by all users. Gnome 2.0 fork is NOT eating our lunch.
Re:Well that confirms it (Score:5, Insightful)
They thought when they had something people were happy and comfortable with that they "lacked direction" so they got together and decided on a direction. So once they got to a point where people were happy and comfortable, they somehow thought it meant it was time for change.
This hits the nail squarely on the head, and seems to me to be one of the biggest flaws of the FOSS community (and I say that as somebody with ACCEPT_LICENCES="-* @FREE" in his /etc/make.conf). Maturity is confused with stagnation, especially in user-visible applications. Look at Slackware changing its version number overnight (albeit as a joking nod to this very situation) and the laughable Firefox release schedule. People in the FOSS community are deathly afraid of being branded as "That guy who released something once, then left it for bitrot."
This also speaks to me of the danger of forming a huge team to work on a project that may not necessarily need one. From my perspective, Gnome 2 was becoming finalized. It wasn't necessarily something I would rave about to my friends, but wasn't something I would complain about (except for this four year, unfixed bug [launchpad.net]). It had reached a plateau of reliability that most software should strive for. But you can't tell the entire Gnome desktop team "Great job, now get out except for Jim and Mike, you two stay on for bugfixes." A team of such evident drive as Gnome's has to be pointed somewhere - even if going anywhere at all is the wrong decision.
Re:No, seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the rant: gonomee 2 was for techies-only, GNOME 3 not...
It's exactly that sort of arrogance that has caused gnome 3 to be dropped from distros(even Debian is replacing it as default). The trouble with Gnome 3 is that they went off on a tangent in search of the "new" and forgot about the existing users.
Re:No, seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The real Gnome 3 problem (Score:4, Insightful)
So now the Gnome team comes along and tries to tell me they know better than I do how I should work. I think they'll find I'll say "Fuck you!" to them just as quickly as I did to Microsoft and Apple.
Re:You want to make a successful UI? Clone Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Delusional or paid by Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
...and I mean delusional because they state they target laptops, yet make an OS for tablets...
Oh don't worry, it does not work great on Tablets either...I tried...
What Arrogance (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux distributions should rethink their purpose.
Fuck you and fuck your arrogant decree that Linux distributions needs to match what you believe them to be. I'm going to make my Linux install exactly what I want. That's half the point of using an open source OS. And unsurprisingly it does not include Gnome 3 (other than a fork like Cinnamon) because its developers and "visionaries" don't give a shit about me, so I don't give a shit about them.
Re:Wow - But wait a minute (Score:3, Insightful)
It is quite amusing to hear Lennart talk about user experience driving everything in the lower level stacks.
man systemctl and weep.
Re:No, seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but my wife has no more trouble with Gnome2 than she has with other computer systems. So saying Gnome2 is for techies, and implying *only* for techies, is being stupid, or perhaps just lying. I'll admit she has trouble with thunderbird, but frankly, that program has a few persistent bugs. Modal dialogs that don't stay on top, e.g. (I suppose you could call that a Gnome2 problem..but I wouldn't.))
What she DOESN'T want is a redesigned interface. She learns how to do things by the positions that things are at on the screen, and if they move, she needs to learn all over again. So whenever I install an OS for her, it needs to be both stable and LTS. I wouldn't even consider either Unity or Gnome3. She would find them impossible, where I just find them ugly and hideously inflexible.
OTOH, I'm not sure what a good alternative would be. Both Xfce and LXDE have a problem with window title bars getting stuck up under the upper panel. This is difficult for *me* to deal with. She just couldn't. Possibly I should investigate fvwm. Or maybe she'd like KDE4 (I don't, but she might). But Gnome3 isn't even on the list.
Re:give it a try first (Score:5, Insightful)
/usability-wise, according to my view, it's Windows 7, OS X, KDE on top, GNOME 2 and others at the middle and GNOME 3, UNITY and Windows 8 at the bottom.
I've been using Unity in 12.04 and I switch between Gnome 2 in Debian and Explorer.exe in Windows 7 multiple times a day and I have to say that the more I use Unity the more I like it. I'd even go so far as to proclaim it the best desktop UI I've ever used. Oddly enough the things I like best are what most other people seem to hate. I'll mention a few and add the disclaimer that Ubuntu works perfectly on my hardware so I'm just going to focus on features.
Dual monitor support is perfect for me in Unity. I plug in the second monitor and immediately it just works. The second monitor gets its own dock and indicator bar at the top just like I would want. When I open an application from the respective docks it opens on the correct monitor. If you move the mouse below a certain speed threshold, it sticks just a little on the dock on the second screen making it easy to aim for despite essentially floating in space.
The dock is practically custom made for wide screen laptops that most people use these days. I naturally want it on the side so it doesn't take up precious vertical pixels. It can be set to stay visible or auto-hide. It's trivially easy to add Windows style "jumplists" to icons for added functionality, i.e., when I click the Show Desktop button I get the desktop but when I right click it I can select Invert Colors which does just what it says. It took a couple of minutes to add that. One thing about the dock some people might not like is if a window cannot be minimized by clicking it's icon only focused. I didn't like it at first but after a while I got to where I appreciated the consistency of clicking a button only doing one thing instead of it acting as some kind of ad-hoc toggle. For me it that's a part of the UI just getting out of my way. I don't have to map my brain away from what I'm concentrating on to worry about whether I want to click on another icon to focus or should I click on the current application's icon to reveal the application underneath. It's a small thing but it actually helps.
The top panel plugin system is a vast improvement over Gnome 2 IMHO. It is consistent, easy to develop for, and just looks nice. Being able to write a quick mail checker in Python and just running it automatically putting it in the panel is golden and much improved over the bonobo framework of old.
Obviously I like Unity and I think it's a step forward for Linux. It does require a bit of an adaptation and it's non-traditional in ways that will ruffle feathers but if you remember Gnome 2 ruffled feathers of the original Gnome diehards but now people sing its praises.