The Last GUADEC? 376
An anonymous reader writes "How can we ensure, together, that this will not be the last GUADEC? Last year, during GUADEC, there was that running joke amongst some participants that this was the last GUADEC. It was, of course, a joke. Everybody was expecting to see each other in Brno, in 2013. One year later, most of those who were joking are not coming to GUADEC. For them, the joke became a reality. People are increasingly leaving the desktop computer to use phones, tablets and services in the cloud. The switch is deeper and quicker than anything we imagined. Projects are also leaving GTK+ for QT. Unity abandoned GTK+, Linus Torvald's Subsurface is switching from GTK+ to Qt. If you spot a GNOME desktop in a conference, chances are that you are dealing with a Red Hat employee. That's it. According to Google Trends, interest in GNOME and GTK+ is soon to be extinct."
Re:Sad, if true (Score:5, Interesting)
Doing that OOP stuff in plain old C is just a travesty. Should have ended many years ago, but for all the self-interested spin and PHBs involved. Anybody remember that company that lost $40 million writing a file browser for Gnome (Nautilus) that ultimately was completely discarded except for some of the expensive artwork?
Re:Foreshadowing (Score:4, Interesting)
I blame removing configurability (Score:5, Interesting)
Gnome 3 was a fuckup, but it started way back, when Havoc Pennington declared that too many options confused users. That was the start of the slippery slope that led us to this scenario. Taking away options completely instead of just offering basic & advanced configuration options was a fucking stupid idea. A desktop or any interface needs to get out of the way and make your day-to-day experience as painless as possible, but Gnome was hijacked by look-at-me designer types with nothing better to do than find ways of breaking shit that worked pretty fucking well. End result? A clusterfuck that nobody wants to use.
Gnome Classic works for me (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried XFCE, but it wasn't quite there. Can't really warm to KDE, either. I miss OpenLook and Saw{mill,fish}.
Looks like I'll totally be out of luck when Gnome dies and X is replaced with Wayland. Might as well run Windows at that point.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have any religious attachement to either toolkit, and I don't care one bit which one I use as a user. But there's GTK bindings to all kinds of languages out there since it's relatively easy to do, whereas there's far fewer for Qt. I can't seem to find any decent bindings for Scheme for instance. I can only assume it's because Qt is quite tightly tied to C++, and languages that don't mesh well with it will have trouble interfacing with it.
Re:Its NOT smartphones. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure why this was modded funny. There is more than an element of truth in it. I can't speak from the perspective of a "normal user" since I'm not one. But I can speak from my own.
Firstly there's GTK. For those not aware, GTK is based on GObject. I've tried using GObject. It may be a very fine object system, and since it's based in C, I imagine that bringing over the runtime is relatively easy, but really it is no fun to use. And by no fun, I mean awful.
The primary reason is that it's all in C. Actually doing heavyweight dynamic style OO in C (basically like Python or Ruby or Javascript) is possible, but it is very, very verbose. Essentially you have to do vast amounts of stuff by-hand and it means that the program logic ends up being very sparsely interleaved with the heaps of required boilerplate. Not only that but the learning curve is very steep. IIRC Rust is a bit like C with native GObject support, so perhaps that will help things. But at the moment programming in GObject is unpleasant.
Secondly, frankly the UI is bad. They seem to be determined to abandon the long held principles of heirachal filesystems and the current working directory. Why oh why oh why when I start up a program in $HOME/projects/foo does the file dialog now default to "favourites" which is something not in the heirachy at all, or the last place I was working. This sort of change is completely unnecessary. If normal users don't start from anywhere else but $HOME then ignoring the current directory won't affect them at all. It only hurts power users.
The thing is, that's just one example. For another example, how many steps does it take to print a document of any sort at 6-up in a GTK program versus the appauling old style dialog like "xpdf"? The answer: lots. Adobe (of all people) proved it was unnecessary by making a really nice system that was simple for all normal stuff, but in the "advanced" box, the GUI options simply added things to an LPR line.
Examples abound of where GNOME is essentially "simplifying" to the point of making things less simple (how is ignoring $PWD unlike every other system simple?) especially for advanced users. The thing is advanecd users are the ones that hack on it and the ones that go to conferences.
If they systematically put off all advanced users, then basically it will be nothing but a commercial project. That's fine if they want it but it will kill off any ecosystem.
Oh and about GLib. A good fraction of the stuff is about providing things like linked lists, resizable arrays, hash tables, essentially all the sort of stuff that's in the STL, except much more verbose, vastly less efficient and not even remotely type safe. And two of those are unnecessary in C if you're prepared to (a) put up with complex macros and (b) have C++ like compile errors.
And other stuff just seems to be there for the sake of it, like the lexical scanner compared to (e.g. FLEX). They could simply have integrated the FLEX runtime into glib and used that as a scanner. It would have been better documented and have much nicer syntax that way.
I know people complain about C++ being complex, but once you add on a library the size of GLib, you've made almost a new language and the complexity arguments pretty much vanish at that point.
Don't get me wrong. For a C library, GLib is very impressive. It allows you to do all sorts of things with C that would otherwise require vast amounts of work and huge amounts of pain. But the problem is it's built on a very low level language and that makes life difficult.
Oh yeah, where was I. Gnome. One other example I remember from a while back.
My mum had an old computer. After Windows 98 became untenable, I put ubuntu on it, since she was feircely opposed to spending money on a new computer if the old one worked. Being young and naive I still did family tech support.
Anyway, it worked pretty well. I hd taught her what a heirachal filesystem was and she was happily able to arrange files in a nice organised manner. Actually
Re:Sad, if true (Score:5, Interesting)
It is sad, in a way, although not surprising to me.
Sad, because it was once so promising; GNOME was once my absolute favourite desktop, but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them. And then they started removing useful features, upsetting their core community - those who were on Linux because it is OPEN, extremely configurable, very inclusive etc - and the GNOME developers became more and more unapproachable and sectarian. I suppose, in a way they chose to follow their own closed set of ideals and lost their way.
Now I use KDE - it is not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I only need good enough, and KDE is good enough for my purposes.
The problem is that Gnome's creator, Miquel de Icaza is a bitch for Windows. Among his sins you can include something like, but even more horrible than, the Windows Registry. Add to that the hubris of the Gnome 3 team and it's a recipe for something that looks good but doesn't do what you want it do do.
KDE's bouncing icons were its biggest turn off for me. I want GUI that "just works" and doesn't attempt to be an art form or a distraction and doesn't require switching off "vanity features" before I can use it.
As a developer, it's also rather important that the UI toolkit is easy to inject into projects, doesn't have bizarre interactions with other subsystems (or itself), supports multiple languages in a developer-friendly way, and last, but not least, has usable documentation. Including sample code and instruction manual. A set of "javadocs" isn't enough.
Re:They shot themselves in the foot (Score:5, Interesting)
Great. Then tell me of all the wonderful Qt applications people commonly use. I use GIMP, Inkscape, Gnumeric GTK+ applications quite frequently and have used zero Qt applications so far.
The bindings are pure shit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever tried to seriously use these Gtk+ bindings for non-C languages? Have you? I'm pretty sure that you haven't, because if you had then you'd know first-hand how they're utter shit, and you wouldn't have suggested that they're a benefit of Gtk+.
Gtkmm is kaka, and that's putting it very nicely. It doesn't even compete with the monstrosity that is wxWidgets, never mind a professional C++ GUI toolkit like Qt.
The C#, OCaml, PHP, Ruby, R, Guile, Ada and Fortran bindings are horribly outdated, and they were kaka to begin with, too.
The Python, Java and Vala bindings are the least-kaka of them all, but they're still kaka compared to the other toolkits that are available. If I'm using Python, I'll use PyQt. If I'm using Java, I'll use AWT, Swing or SWT. Nobody actually uses Vala for anything, so it's out of the picture right away.
The rest of the bindings are somewhere in the middle. They're still kaka, and I would not use them.
Then there are the JavaScript bindings. Only somebody with kaka for brains would use JavaScript outside of the browser in the first place. There's no reason for these bindings to even exist.
Yeah, the bindings exist to some degree for several different languages, but that doesn't mean they're any good, and it surely doesn't mean that they're actually usable or useful. Given this, it means that they aren't really a benefit of Gtk+.
Re:Its NOT smartphones. (Score:5, Interesting)
GObject is not the problem. If you are a C++ programmer which dislikes having to type macros all the time you can just use gtkmm.
The problem is they broke compatibility with GTK+ 2.x with the release of GTK+ 3 and the platform portability remains low. I know several developers who are revolting and porting their code to Qt instead of making the changes to migrate to GTK+ 3.
You can port Qt applications to mobile devices, Windows, and Mac OS X for example while GTK+ applications run well on Linux and poorly everywhere else. The Windows port has always been a bit of a mess even if it works. Slow and full of graphic glitches. The MacOS X port has been in limbo since like forever. The mobile port is non existent.
I still use GNOME. (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally still use GNOME. I've always preferred GTK+ over Qt, not only because I prefer its look, I also prefer the fact that it is focused on being a GUI toolkit, while Qt is a kitchen sink with a horrible C++ design and full of stuff better done elsewhere.
GNOME 3 is shit, but you can still run gnome-panel just fine (and metacity if you want it), even with Ubuntu, and that's what I do.
The more serious problem is that with the obsolescence of GTK+, we may end up not having a good standard GUI toolkit to write applications on Linux anymore.
There is much focus on graphics lately with the alternatives to X.org being developed, but Linux still doesn't have a good solution to make graphical apps with resolution independence, proper text rendering, fluid layout and good accessibility. Not that other operating systems are being that much better at any of this.
Re:Sad, if true (Score:4, Interesting)
That wasn't him. I also accused him of gconf, on this very website, and he replied that it wasn't him but another of the gnome group that came, set up that travesty, and left it half finished. The facts checked out. I suspect that gconf is completely dead now with gnome3 and good riddance to it, whether the idea was sound or not is immaterial since the execution was not sound.
Re:Its NOT smartphones. (Score:5, Interesting)
i was an active user and *very* minor contributor in 1999-2005. gtk, glib and gobject are definitely awkward to use. some of that is due to being written in c, but much of the awkwardness is due to being written in a way that allows binding from other languages (bindings exist for javascript, python, java, c++, ...). eg, the callback "marshaling" made stepping thru code in gdb painful
i always hoped that someone would strip out the language-agnostic support and make a pure c library. but nobody seemed excited about the prospect
another problem was that gtk et al attempted to be incredibly generic. the language-agnostic support is one example. another is that i proposed a key binding that would break focus and guarantee that alt-f would activate the file menu and was told that there was "nothing special about the menubar" in the context of gtk. and then gnome was at the other extreme - attempting to be very minimal and rigid. in between was a vast no man's land