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."
Long-Term? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, I'm typing this on Arch Linux 64-bit with GNOME 3.2.1 and a few (needed!) shell extensions. I find it fine and I thought I would be a GNOME 3 hater but I'm actually not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I love Gnome 3's concept, and I tried really hard to get used to its current limitations. But in the end I gave up and searched for a more usable setup. I made a Frankenstein composed of LXDE with Compiz and Nautilus. It is significantly faster than Gnome 3, and has all the keyboard shortcuts I'm used to for handling a 3x3 workspace grid (mapped to Ctrl+KP_n).
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:3)
Which makes perfect sense. Gtk3 and other developer-side stuff is not broken, and so long as they keep it as is, apps written for Gnome will work. The problem with Gnome 3 is the UI design of the desktop itself.
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: (Score:3)
Does it really matter? You pretty much have to mix libraries already on a desktop Linux system. If you want the best file manager, Krusader, you have to load KDE libs. If you want the best spread sheet, Gnumeric, you have to load Gnome libs. Thankfully RAM is cheap and this is not a real obstacle in practice.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely. I always thought that only an idiot would use gnome-terminal and gedit when the vastly superior konsole and kate were only an apt-get or yum install away, even under gnome.
Re:Long-Term? (Score:5, Insightful)
If no one tries, it never happens. GNOME3 with its GNOME shell sucks ass and turns a desktop into a netbook candy toy interface. Perhaps if they are successful at giving it older/better functionality, then after the public appreciates it, they might merge it in with GNOME3 in some way.
GNOME3 shell extensions need to be better managed and maintained. My second attempt at using Fedora... this time 16 is still a failure as far as I'm concerned. The extensions idea is nice but it doesn't inherently manage the options. What resulted was a GNOME3 shell that wouldn't load unless I kept shuffling extensions to try to get what I want. GNOME3 and its extensions interface does not account for or manage the extensions which are present and running. (It seems kind of obvious to me that when a UI element is being manipulated in some way by an extension, a 'lock' preventing other extensions from acting on it should be created and enforced.)
I have heard there is now some sort of central extensions repository and I hope it alleviates the extensions mess I experienced but I think over this holiday time, I am going to load CentOS 6.x instead of Fedora.
Lately it seems software projects are refusing to listen to their users and it shows. GNOME3's shell, Firefox and SME server are three that have affected me in a large way and none of them seem interested in listening to the feedback.
Re: (Score:3)
you would do well to try the latest mint. it has a hacked version of gs3 and still works pretty good. its very usable, the top-right hot-corner thing works amazingly, minimize works (mostly), multiple desktops works, you also have a traditional 'start' menu and its much, much faster than unity. oh, and i can't seem to find any obvious bugs either. there are plenty of customization options too.
one thing i completely hate is the custom icon for firefox, its really irritating. but it can be changed by a simple
Cool (Score:2)
Cinna-Mint, anyone?
Excellent (Score:2)
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid name? Cinnamon vs GNOME? Come to think about it all these years I've been telling people "I use GNOME", I wonder how that sounded to them. Maybe I should have been putting emphasis on the G or something and made it sound like a rapper name. "I use gee-nome dawg".
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Funny)
My mother overheard a conversation I was having about a certain linux distribution. After the conversation she asked "who is Debbie and why are you talking about her open sores?"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Only you can answer that question. Try 'em both. You can install both on Mint 12 and log into either one. Just be aware that MATE is nowhere near mature yet.
Keep away the UI "designers"! (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever they do, they need to make sure that they do everything in their power to keep away the self-labeled "UI designers" who have fucked over GNOME, Firefox, and numerous other major open source projects lately.
These people may think they know how to create a usable UI, but experience shows that they have no fucking idea what they're doing. Just look at how damn unusable Firefox is these days. The menus are gone, the status bar is gone, the protocol in the URL bar is gone. It's hard to get anything done in Firefox. Sure, I can dig through the settings to re-enable those things that should never have been disabled by default, but that takes far too much effort. It's easier to ditch Firefox. The same goes for GNOME. The "designers" fucked up its UI, and now it's unusable. Now we see real software developers trying desperately to fix the situation.
It's more harmful to an open source project to let them contribute than it is to constantly shut them down. Do not respond to them on mailing lists or IRC. Do not let them get any sort of commit rights. Close any "usability" bugs they open. Do not let them participate in any way.
Only let actual software developers create UIs. They may not be pretty, but at least they'll be functional and much better than anything "designed" by the "UI designers" that have ruined GNOME and Firefox.
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:Keep away the UI "designers"! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox is at least copying an interface that hundreds of millions of people use in Chrome, maybe it's not for you but it certainly seems to work for a lot of people. I'm using Chrome on a 24" screen right now and I can't say I miss any of the things you mention much. Mozilla is quite deluded if they think that's why I use Chrome though. GNOME on the other hand choose to go their own way, really their own way. Which wouldn't be so bad if they didn't constantly collapse the path behind them, if you liked it
Re:Keep away the UI "designers"! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have no problem with self-proclaimed UI designers as long as they'd respect the following very basic "rules of thumb":
* Every command can have a keyboard shortcut.
* Issuing a command immediately provides visual feedback (always and with absolutely no visible delay, even menu items should blink).
* While a command is issued or visual feedback is given other commands can be issued without delay, provided that processing has not become very slow and the queue becomes long (the latter must be avoided at all costs by using suitable programming techniques and data structures but of course sometimes a machine is just doing too much work).
* Important commands are no more than one mouse click away, less important ones 2 or a maximum 3. There is really no need for an UI where you need to click or open 3 different menus/views/buttons/windows to get anywhere.
* All visible GUI elements such as toolbars, panels, buttons are freely configurable both in their content and their spacing and place.
* All interface elements can be selected and used with the keyboard or there are equivalent keyboard commands.
* Windows and interface elements always remember their settings such as position, size, etc.
* Modal dialogs are avoided as much as possible.
* Instant/live update of the results of search fields is welcome, but then it must be instant--no delay.
Voila! A working GUI...at least in my opinion.
Re:Keep away the UI "designers"! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps you're talking about the status bar. Again, something I can't believe anyone would notice or care about. A largely blank, useless bar that was practically only good for previewing link URLS was removed from the GUI and replaced with something smarter. Again, how is this a major change?
Useless to you, perhaps. But the replacement is a kludge for tiny screens that's a horrible mess on a desktop with a decently sized monitor. I find it's contnually covering up things I want to click on all for the sake of not 'wasting' a few pixels on a 1920x1080 monitor; it's annoying, it's ugly and it provides no benefit over the old status bar.
You make it difficult for people who actually have good, valid criticism and feedback of GNOME 3, etc., to be heard, because you dilute the discussion with completely bizarre, emotional, thoughtless statements.
Or perhaps you just don't bother to understand why people want these 'useless' features.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The more minor part of the hostility is that the defaults are stupid. Sure, you can change them if you want, but why should the 99% of sane people have to go to even that much trouble just to cater for the 1% of idiots who like the tabs in the wrong place, and the utterly pointless Amazing Invisible Menu?
The destruction of the status bar was just plain stupid, and there is no option to bring it back. You have to install an addon to regain elementary usability because of this moronic decision.
The major part
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe i can help, i actually think Gnome3 looks nice, i think it would be pretty good on a touchscreen, but dumb unforgivable desktop changes include;
- Disabling desktop icons by default (can only have a bare wallpaper unless you modify the registry, which average users wont do)
- If you do have desktop icons enabled, you can see them at the same time as the applications selector thing.
- No minimise button, instead you have to rightclick, select minimum press button. 3 steps instead o
Re: (Score:3)
Yep, knowing that is kind of relevant.
But worse is that the text on the bar is different from the text you type, different from the text at the favorites, different from the text you get if you copy it...
Not that huge a problem, but still a problem.
I thought Gnome (Score:5, Funny)
Awesome. (Score:5, Insightful)
The components of GNOME3 are mostly great, but the overall experience is terrible; the thing feels like it's designed for tablets, or as part of a blue-sky interface experiment. They took out most of the options that would've let people make it usable again, and have showed hostility to existing apps and user priorities (screensavers are so 90s? Really?). Compatibility with apps written against GNOME3 libraries is great, especially if we can get most of the good stuff from GNOME2 back.
If the GNOME Foundation doesn't want to deal with this, they should get rid of a lot of the people who made the poor decisions that led them to release a terrible, constraining product.
Re:Awesome. (Score:5, Funny)
"the thing feels like it's designed for tablets,"
YOU WILL WORSHIP TABLETS DAMMIT and YOU WILL WANT A TABLETACEOUS INTERFACE on everything which is not a tablet!!!!
Yours in Unity,
The GNOME Foundation.
I don't care any more (Score:5, Interesting)
I have converted all of my systems to XFCE. It feels like an older, simpler and leaner Gnome to me and some of the applets even have better functionality.
Re: (Score:2)
XFCE is good, but i'd prefer an environment that's cross platform. They've gotten linux centric in the last few releases.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Why doesn't Gnome get it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The community has beating Gnome over the head for months now. But Gnome stubbornly refuses to go back to their less FUBAR interface.
What the hell is wrong with them?
Oh well, at least there's forking.
Re:Why doesn't Gnome get it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well, at least there's forking.
Forking is the answer to borking.
Re:You're... (Score:5, Insightful)
A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome. Just Gnome, we didn't have to call it Gnome 2.x. Now we have Gnome 2.x, plain Gnome 3.x, Unity, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions, MATE and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?
I'm still happily using Gnome 2.x (on LMDE), but it won't last forever :/
GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:3, Interesting)
GNOME has always had the shittiest developer and user community of all of the major Linux desktop projects. This is because politics, rather than the development of practical software, have been its driving force.
It was initially created to "fight" against KDE, solely because KDE was using Qt and Qt had a proprietary license at the time. There wasn't any technical need for GNOME. Most people were quite pleased with KDE and its abilities. So GNOME wasn't even addressing a real technological deficiency in the
Re: (Score:3)
I use GObject all the time. It's not that bad, especially if used from high-level languages.
No, if you want to complain about Gnome's libraries I can give you some places to start;GObject isn't one of them.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:4, Interesting)
At the time objective-C developers were, if they were interested in desktop development working on Mac, OpenSTEP or GNUStep. Java was too slow for a desktop and had bad Linux support, though this was a major consideration. QT was amazingly good for C++, Gnome couldn't compete. So they created a system for C programmers who didn't know C++.
They had to reinvent the wheel because they had to recruit people. There were a lot of C programmers that were willing to work on Linux desktop apps.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
QT was amazingly good for C++, Gnome couldn't compete
But the idea was to make an *open source* desktop environment. I am sure a lot of C++ programmers would have gone helped an effort to make an open-source version of QT.
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.
C is good. (Score:4, Interesting)
GObject has features C++ doesn't include natively, like type introspection.
Besides, what's wrong with C for a low-level API? You can connect just about any C-based API to a higher level language.
Re: (Score:3)
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:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree with you. As a vendor, I find shipping gnome to be a nightmare. It had a ridiculous number of dependancies and is rather unpleasant to build. I haven't looked much at the Gnome 3 stuff yet so perhaps they've improved it, but Gnome 2 had dependancies on webkit and firefox. What kind of idiot thought that up? Epiphany rocks with webkit, but using libxul to get help is stupid. It should be ported to webkit.
Further, the gnome community only cares about Linux. if you're not a linux distro, they don't take upstream patches and they don't like you. Considering what Ubuntu went through with them (not that i agree with all the ubuntu changes), I'm not shocked to set yet another fork of gnome. I think this fork will fail on the sheer weight. Too many things depend on parts of gnome and you'll end up trying to track updated libraries yet trying to keep old code running. It gets ugly.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't disagree with your take on the politics. I do take issue with the technology.
Very odd. After making that statement you go on to validate just about everything the GP said.
You get modded up for starting an argument, but before you've written 2 paragraphs you've agreed with the other guy by just using different words.
Are you guys brothers?
My brothers used to fight against each other on but the same side of the argument a lot too.
Seems like the arguments always ended with "Ok then". To which the other replied "Fine".
Agreeing with every point here, except one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Modularity is a good thing. It's not cutting up things into a lot of small modules (aka "libraries") that's the problem.
It's doing it wrong.
Look at the typical bash shell and GNU utilities we all use every day. They are hundreds of small executables, libraries, etc. But they are not a mess. They all do one thing, and do it well. That's part of the UNIX philosophy, and for a reason.
And about KDE: A monoculture is never good. Even two are not enough for a healthy ecosystem. And what's the problem with forking anyway? It doesn't hurt anyone,and nearly has no overhead. (If you use git and know how to use it.) The fear over "fragmentation" is entirely delusional and pointless. We are not one of those idiotic "everybody must follow his party line, no matter what" systems. We are not a US two party system. :)
In fact, I think every user should have his own fork by default. Where "fork" can mean anything from an empty patch set to fundamental major changes. And everybody should just be able to "subscribe" to whoever else's personal fork, implicitly making that someone else a "distributor" without having to do anything special. So that natural leader/follower structures can arise, and nobody can force anything on anyone.
(Sorry for sounding so angry. I don't mean to say this in a attacking way. I'm just a bit beside myself right now for completely unrelated reasons, and can't switch it off. Your post is still 95% in harmony with my opinions.
Also, there is one additional thing you missed: The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency. And all for the sake of Joe Sixpack, who is a retarded dick anyway, please please loving you... but not really loving you, since you deformed yourself until you talked like a Windows/OSX and walked like a Windows/OSX, and he really only loves you when you have become more Windows/OSX and Windows/OSX itself. In other words: He still won't love you. So quit lying and be yourself! Same as the typical problem geeks have with women, interestingly.)
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: (Score:3)
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)
Yep, that's pretty bad. Windows 7's "Libraries" are up there too: suddenly, there's a whole new filesystem-level directory-like abstraction which doesn't exist at the filesystem level, but is only a fiction created by Explorer.exe. And can't be addressed by any kind of path. How am I supposed to point a user to their library? "Go to C:\... oh bugger. Um, point at the... clicky thing... no the other... um.... well, I can't see your screen over the phone, so, er... good luck!"
Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Modularity is a good thing. It's not cutting up things into a lot of small modules (aka "libraries") that's the problem.
It's doing it wrong.
Look at the typical bash shell and GNU utilities we all use every day. They are hundreds of small executables, libraries, etc. But they are not a mess. They all do one thing, and do it well. That's part of the UNIX philosophy, and for a reason.
Are you joking? They absolutely are a mess, and I say that as someone who uses them every day. I'm just not fooling myself into thinking they're not a mess. UNIX shells and utils have had a chaotic development history and are chock full of bad design. Most of the good utils do a lot more than one thing, and they are usually far less than excellent, just good enough to suffice if you fight them long enough to get them to do what you want. And don't get me started on the gaping abyss of existential Lovecraftian horror that is shell code, or (shudder) Perl. (and I even like perl! But it's also an eldritch tool of the Many-Angled Ones.)
The only reason the entire lot hasn't been incinerated and replaced by saner tools with better and more consistent design is that there's far too much legacy code out there which depends on the behavior of existing UNIX shells, tools, and scripting languages. Just look Plan 9. Even though it was very much a UNIX-philosophy OS, only more so, and better designed than the original, by the same people who designed UNIX in the first place, it failed to gain any traction because it came far too late. UNIX already had unstoppable critical mass.
You're falling into the trap of believing that the ideal is the practice. UNIX started out as a very hacky OS because squeezing advanced features into a PDP-7 was Hard. The subsequent 40 years of continuous and divergent development, little of it done by people primarily concerned with "do-one-thing-and-do-it-well", have left that ethos in tatters.
You're also falling into the trap of believing without rational reason that one philosophy of software design is best for everything. One-thing-and-do-it-well is a fine idea for a software environment intended to filter text through independently written programs, but it might not work so great for easy to learn and use GUIs.
In fact, I think every user should have his own fork by default. Where "fork" can mean anything from an empty patch set to fundamental major changes. And everybody should just be able to "subscribe" to whoever else's personal fork, implicitly making that someone else a "distributor" without having to do anything special. So that natural leader/follower structures can arise, and nobody can force anything on anyone.
Okay, so you're a crazy guy.
Also, there is one additional thing you missed: The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency.
This is not even on the same planet as right and wrong.
Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one... (Score:4, Insightful)
That said there is no denying how "organic" some tools are. There is no consistent syntax between tools, and some tools are arcane or implement arcane default settings. I also have a love / hate relationship between bash, gawk and perl and constantly have to relearn these bastards when I need to write a script because they're almost write-only languages and virtually unmaintainable once they grow beyond a certain size. I once had to port a 5000 line cgi perl script which could generate 6 disparate web pages into Java. It took six months to unpick and reimplement.
Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one... (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency./p>
YES. THIS. EXACTLY THIS.
I really, really want a Unix desktop which actually implements the Unix philosophy, and very much want my windowspace to be exposed as a file system (or rather, as a VERY loosely / completely untyped object system. And no, sadly JSON objects don't quite cut it, which is a problem since we're baking JSON into the Web. Lua objects would probably work though; they're pretty nice, and it interoperates well with C.)
I want the ability to, just as you say, reuse objects and components from one "application" inside another. In fact, I want to completely erase the concept of "application"; I just want a robust store of data, as a set of fine-grained untyped objects/collections, and then various views or functions over that data. And then yes, publish any part of my data/function/object hierarchy in a safe, standard way to a net-wide repository as a sort of mini-distribution, and safely import subsets of other people's stuff into mine.
See, there's a whole lot of nonsense busywork we're currently doing in the system administration space which duplicates and triplicates stuff we've almost solved in the programming space - only badly, and without interoperability. For example, what is a zipfile but an untyped object containing other files? What's a directory but an almost-but-not-quite-the-same object? What's a filesystem but again, an almost-but-not-quite-the-same thing? What's a version control "commit" but the same thing as an RPM/DEB patch, except implemented differently? What's a "distribution" but something that ought to just be an RPM of RPMs? And what are SQL "databases" and "tables" but again, objects containing sets of data, and why do I need multiple different incompatible formats for each one?
So we have, at the OS/system level, these various different implementations of the idea of "structured object", but not really done sensibly; for one thing, there's this very archaic concept of a single shared filesystem which is very much like the old pre-1960s (FORTRAN and COBOL) programming concept of global variables. In programming languages, we moved past global variables toward structured sets of local variables when C came along; but we didn't at the filesystem level. This leads inevitably to easy corruption of a system: run one installer with root priviledges, and it has access to your entire root namespace on your hard drive. Our systems shouldn't really, in 2011, be structured in such an old-fashioned way.
So at the OS layer we have "files and directories as objects". Then we have a process-management layer over the top: libraries, processes, threads. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" AGAIN (but in a non-interoperable way) as various "software component" frameworks (which of course install into a global per-system namespace, stomping all over each other to create DLL hell): COM objects, XPCOM objects (Mozilla), UNO objects (OpenOffice), CORBA objects, COM objects, KParts objects, GObject objects, .NET assemblies, Java namespaces. And a "registry", which reimplements the filesystem, to handle invocation of the software componentry. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" a fifth time as non-persistent programming-language objects which only exist in a single running process space : C++ objects, PHP objects, JSON/Javascript objects, .NET objects, Java
Re:Agreeing with every point here, except one... (Score:4, Insightful)
We are moving away from container-based storage units to metadata-based storage, precisely because the notion that everything is a file is quite limited. And these limitations aren't even new - symbolic links are in some ways a hack that breaks that base approach - you can refer to the same object from multiple different container, which - by itelf, is a rudimentary relation mechanism. I won't even mention ACLs - you access a file, but the system actually opens (at least) 2 files in many implementations, because the "file" notion doesn't comprehend accountability or complex ownership.
The big players (Apple and Microsoft) have been moving away from file-based storage for years, and on to metadata-based stored approach. And no, afaik this isn't something you can easily slap over an existing filesystem.
Also, the same concept you praise is contrary to the integration you preach - each vendor should implement the funcionality they need over the archaic "file" concept, as there is no "one size fits all" when it becomes to content decoding, and for the base libraries to actually be useful, they would have to be generic (think of the file api right now).
We have huge bloated frameworks because different people has different needs, and processing power is cheap - cheaper than development time. That's what having a programmable device is all about - being able to write your own bloat how you think it should be implemented, instead of eating the other person's bloat.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What would the API for this "single persistent, networked, yet not completely shared-global" object concept look like? If nothing is typed, how - for example - does an image manipulation program know which objects represent data, which objects represent manipulations, and how to actually fit the two together? What if I come up with a new and useful way of manipulating data which doesn't fit into the existing API? If what used to be a large database in an optimised binary format is now a millions of indiv
Re: (Score:3)
There wasn't any technical need for GNOME. Most people were quite pleased with KDE and its abilities
I failed to follow you here.
Most people is not all the people. If not all the people are pleased with something, then we have a valid technical need for an alternative.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:5, Insightful)
The world has moved on from the 1990s desktop. Windows 8 is replacing the Start menu with a radical new touch interface, and OS X Lion has adopted iOS features. Mobile operating systems that look and feel nothing like desktop operating systems are a huge hit. The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.
You may consider it abhorrent, but you are a minority. The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:4, Insightful)
PLEASE MOD PARENT UP. Abusive moderation detected.
I do not agree with what it's saying, but the opinion is valid and the guy didn't do any offense!
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:5, Insightful)
I use my computer as a tool. And as such it must be efficient. If make a hammer from soft rubber justifying that "common user might get hurt when using metal hammers" then you are making a goddamn toy, not a tool. And that is exactly what Gnome crew is doing. I get that they are trying to make an impressive interface for tablet PC, but why should regular PC users suffer? Would it hurt them to go play in a "Gnome-Tablet" version of the interface without crippling the desktop version? Those that would not need customizability and would be happy with all the bling could play with the new interface all they want and those that do any actual work could continue to do so without switching DEs.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no.
It's the "Silicon Valley effect".
That is, some guys change stuff in the UI and declare it's where the innovation is. It's not that it's good. It's just different, and backed with strong advertising (Apple, etc).
Then others feel they *have* to follow a similar path to survive and "have something new to announce". Otherwise, you're not news worthy, etc, etc.
I also call it being blind :P
It's fine to copy concepts, but copy the ones that are actually good.
Re:GNOME has always been fucked up. (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.
The rest of the world uses windows or OS X.
I find it odd that FOSS advocates are willing to reject much of what they find useful with desktop enviornments to make them more appealing to people who will likely never use them...
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.
Not wrong ... RIGHT (Score:2)
Nothing went wrong. It's going RIGHT. Just like when we had - not just Gnome like you say - but also KDE (and now Trinity), Xfce, LXDE, etc. - oh wait, we still have all those. It's an open world. Options are not circumscribed.
Re: (Score:3)
Linux as a whole (kernels, UIs...) has turned into a developers dick size contest. Everybody wags their own, nobody debug/documents/supports appropriately for end users.
Re: (Score:2)
yeah, you'd have thought that devs would have "grown up" by now, focussing more on end-product with all the responsibilities that entails rather than a somewhat teenage approach that is more based on the developer's egos.
Maybe in another ten years, but I imagine the current crop of devs who participate in this environment will give up, leaving it to a new bunch of kids who perpetuate the same old attitudes.
Re:You're... (Score:5, Insightful)
What? This fork sounds like it is entirely to create the best end product. Keep the parts that have improved in Gnome 3, but get back the good stuff from Gnome 2.
I've been using Mint for months, it's a good OS. It seems to me that this guy has his head screwed on right - as opposed to those who are desperate to turn their desktop OS into something that only makes sense on a tablet.
Re:You're... (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux as a whole (kernels, UIs...) has turned into a developers dick size contest. Everybody wags their own, nobody debug/documents/supports appropriately for end users.
Linux as a whole, is the kernel. The kernel. There are different versions, patches, etc. but it's one kernel.
Maybe you mean open source as a whole?
Maybe you mean software as a whole. That would make a whole lot more sense. Except it hasn't "turned in" to anything... it's always been that way.
Re: (Score:2)
what the hell went wrong?
My theory is that everyone who is in any way involved in UI development now thinks they're the next Steve Jobs and that they are justified in imposing their brilliant and unparalleled vision on everyone.
Re: (Score:3)
Gnome is doing a major breaking change, that is going to cause a huge shift in its user base. Ubuntu created a whole generation of Linux users that were Gnome users by default. Those people are now picking their replacement desktop and well.... that's a good chunk of the /. Linux users.
Nothing went wrong, Gnome's intention was to make this change.
Re: (Score:3)
A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome
Clearly, not everyone was as happy as you thought. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many people working on so many alternatives.
and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?
Not a damn thing. You can use gnome 2.x until MATE is working well enough to replace it. It's really the same thing.
I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI. I've used fvwm, twm, windowmaker, enlightenment, kde, gnome 1, gnome 2, xfce, unity, gnome shell (with extensions). Honestly I think these things just keep improving over time. But
Re:You're... (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI.
Muscle memory.
Once you've gotten used to using a specific UI for years on end, the commands are basically hard-coded into your body. Changing this takes a lot of time and effort and you will often find yourself automatically doing things the old way.
Re:You're... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Jon McCann, in an interview, seemed to say that user configurability is a bug, detracting from GNOME presenting a single face to people who might consider switching to GNOME. "And I think there is a lot of value to have that experience you show the world to be consistent. In GNOME2 we didn't do that particularly well because everyone's desktop was different."
Re:You're... (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed [wikipedia.org], rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems. OS X has even carried compatibility with old apps for at least 5 years, and its been through a major operating system redesign and CPU architecture shift.
Can I do that with the free unix desktop? Sure, vanilla X apps probably work, but every major rev of KDE (haven't tried old gnome apps on newer gnome versions) breaks heaps of old apps. Every version of KDE or Gnome i have ever used since both projects began (i remember compiling KDE 1.0 and QT from source and being impressed :)), i have found "wierd" shit where i can make part of the UI crash or errors thrown on screen.
Please: stop fucking around with eye candy and the colour of the bicycle shed. Debug what you have, get it stable and THEN go about adding new stuff. Just because Windows or OS X has new feature of the month, it doesn't mean you need to kludge a clone of it on top of your DE within 2 weeks in some shitty half-assed way.
"Usability" of a UI is to a certain extent, bullshit. Most users can adapt to design decisions made on your environment. Apple knows this - yes, I wish i could customise the OS X desktop a bit more, but at the end of the day the fact that I can't is no major deal-breaker. Because it actually works. Yes, UI testing can make soemthing a little nicer to use - but if it is full of bugs, crashes, breaks your old apps that you like and generally misbehaves, then all that usability testing and research is WASTED.
I didn't mean this to turn into a big unix-desktop rant, but i've been really wanting to like the unix desktop since 1995. Some aspects of it, I do love. But since the days of say, KDE2 (or gnome equivalent - essentially when we got a usable file manager style desktop), there's been very little actual progress in real world usablity that I can see. Sure, there's new eye candy. Whoopie. Can it help me get shit done better? Not really.... progress appears to have stagnated.
Re: (Score:3)
The issue is that Windows adopted the Aero interface. That means both Mac and Windows have interfaces vastly more sophisticated than what is available on KDE2. If they didn't do the eye candy work Linux desktop would look a decade behind minimum.
Also there have been features added, for example unified notification, that is all applications being able to send messages to end users in a unified way that is configurable by the end user. That is a major shift for both KDE and Gnome.
As for old apps, this is L
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually i was more referring to the rip offs of spotlight/windows search, launchpad, etc., but good point. A new Windows feature is no excuse for Linux being broken. Haven't tried it recently, but when the composted desktop was first implemented, it broke openG
Re: (Score:2)
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed [wikipedia.org], rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI.
A stable ABI is the reason why Windows is such a crock of crap and Microsoft can't fix poor decisions made twenty years ago. It's also pointless when most software people run on Linux is open source.
Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not sure if you've used Windows recently, but its actually quite a way away from being a crock of crap. Resource intensive? Yes. RAM is cheap. All my hardware works properly, virtually all of my apps work properly, and I'm not having to go track down old versions of library X to recompile simply to find myseilf mired in dependency hell.
Don't get me wrong: Windows is no shining example of desktop design. But in terms of getting shit done with a minimum of fucking around fixing broken shit - we're
Re: (Score:3)
Then a "Gnome2 theme" should be pretty trivial then?
Otherwise, this kind of fork is exactly what a lot of users have been screaming for since the new UI changes were shoved down everyone's throats.
The community screamed bloody murder and someone decided to "step up" and do the work for the benefit of the rest of us.
Suitable renumeration should be sent in Mint's general direction.
Re: (Score:2)
Must... resist... must... resist.... AAGGHH!!
REMUNERATION
Re: (Score:2)
There's a number of users making it do what they want [linuxmint.com] but they're running up against nonsense, like having to edit files in a specific order.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And we care about what you like because ..? (Score:2)
You're free to carry on using whatever you like but the rest of us want a usable desktop.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And I care because ..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody cares that you don't care. Get over yourself. Seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Good for you (sincerely). But for the VAST majority this is wonderful news. In the end, we can both be happy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously? Gnome2 is on a fast track to official abandonware. You won't get security patches, you won't get any new functionality, new apps that use GTK3 won't work right with it, the underpinnings will change and Gnome2 itself will no longer work right. MATE is the fork to Gnome2, and Cinnamon is the fork to Gnome3 Shell. Absolutely no reason not to have both, for different reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
You won't get security patches, you won't get any new functionality, new apps that use GTK3 won't work right with it, the underpinnings will change and Gnome2 itself will no longer work right.
When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?
Last few years GNOME has been same. Even KDE SC 4.8 has now more features than KDE 3.5 had and when compared to amount of those, GNOME has almost none.
GNOME 2.x users are going to be fine as long as just their needed applications can be ran on it.
Re: (Score:3)
When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?
Somewhere in the last year or so it got one of those Windows-style 'Program Load of Bollocks is not responding, do you really want to shut down?' dialog boxes that made me want to uninstall it almost overnight. One of the things I've always liked about Linux is that I could tell it to shut down and walk away, knowing that when I came back in two weeks it would actually have shut down, unlike Windows where it would be sitting there at some stupid dialog box waiting for a response it would never get.
And then
Re: (Score:2)
Nope; wrong. Gnome2 had as many panels as you wanted. Some distros defaulted to one; some defaulted to two.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The Mint developers have removed the engines from their cars and attached teams of mules. The next release to be known as Borax.
yeah, and the Gnome designers designed a car that has only one stick, nothing else, no weel, no pedals, no buttons no nothing, but a single stick ... then you to take it to the freeway, and everything is fine until you get in an intersection and it starts to rain, and you need to steer, change gears and start the windshield wipers in the same time ...