GNOME Foundation To Focus On Fundraising After Years Running A Deficit (phoronix.com) 38
The GNOME Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting the GNOME desktop environment, has been operating at a deficit for several years, depleting its financial reserves. Robert McQueen, the foundation's president, has announced plans to increase fundraising efforts in a new blog post.
McQueen adds: As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss -- ie spending more than we've been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We've now "hit the buffers" of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can't approve any more deficit budgets -- to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.
McQueen adds: As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss -- ie spending more than we've been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We've now "hit the buffers" of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can't approve any more deficit budgets -- to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.
better desktops out there (Score:2)
Haven't used GNOME for a long time. MATE is better.
Maybe GNOME should die
Re: better desktops out there (Score:1)
Well, actually MATE IS a fork of Gnome, specifically of Gnome 2.
After a few years they ported it to Gtk3
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Ironically MATE is a fork of GNOME (2). It's very usable, I use it as well. Even though my distro has second-rate support for it, it's still way better than GNOME 3 and its aggravating built-in inability to run shell scripts from the GUI.
The fact people are still using over 10 year old software over their current product probably should be a leading indicator.
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Haven't used GNOME for a long time. MATE is better.
Maybe GNOME should die
I like the look and feel of Mate as well. I moved to Mint Mate after Ubuntu went ugly.
Here's my proposal (Score:1)
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Operating at a deficit for several years (Score:3)
I wonder how that could have happened. I also wonder if their fundraising capabilities are as great as their design skills and their self reflection.
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I remember hitting the Gnome 3 / Unity thing. I tried it for a while, then found out about Linux Mint, MATE, and Cinnamon. I've looked around since, and always came back to Mint and its variants.
Some of the Ubuntu derivatives have gotten better. It seems like the Ubuntu variants have UI tweaks to make them resemble Unity. Linux Mint UI's always seems so much better.
When suffering on Windows, I find myself thinking that Linux Mint is what Windows should be ...
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OT: I'm a KDE kind of guy. I'm looking to switch from Kubuntu to Mint. Would you recommend MATE or Cinnamon?
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I used KDE for years and years. Then switched to Mint about 2 years ago and decided to try Cinnamon. I thought for sure I would give up in a few days and load Plasma/KDE under Mint.
I was pleasantly surprised. KDE/Plasma is much more refined and has more options and controls, but most of it I don't care about... and it has gotten so big and complicated. Cinnamon just works and isn't annoying and has gotten better with each update. I ended up using it every day since. I do recommend it. And yes, you ca
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My preference is Cinnamon. If you have the horsepower, go for the better interface. Pretty much everything nowadays has the horsepower.
Both are good.
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KDE3 was better an Mate. But that, like gnome2, got updated out of existence. KDE4 had promise at first, but they kept fiddling with it until it didn't. So I, also, use Mate thes edays.
Re: Operating at a deficit for several years (Score:2)
KDE3 is the one I like to describe as an explosion in a widget factory.
4 had promise but didn't develop it until it became 5.
5 has a bad bug with wine programs, some of them will only run in the background. Haven't tried to see if 6 has the same problem...
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KDE since 4 always seemed resource heavy on 'old' hardware.
e.g. Okular, it's the kitchen sink of file viewers but if I gave it a 30 page PDF from a film festival brochure it would choke whereas Atril from Mate would render it fine.
I'll revisit KDE 6 some day with a Vulkan-savvy graphics card but in the meantime XFCE still flies on anything from my Core 2 Duo laptop to a Core i5.
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I am running XFCE and Compiz on a system with a 4060. It's lovely. The animations could be a little smoother, but I am absolutely loving the high quality mipmaps that are missing from KDE. You can really see what is going on in the icon hover previews. My CPU is a 1600 AF (Pinnacle Ridge) which is pretty poky by modern standards, but it was replacing a FX-8350.
Now I just need to finish building avant-window-navigator. The XFCE4 dock is pretty meh. The fucking clock stopped updating for over an hour this mor
Would be better (Score:1)
Would be better if they focused on making desktop environment that force a touch paradigm that is useless for real work. Linux is still typically used on PC on real desktops for real work. Focusing on touch in that environment is fucking idiotic.
I think you're missing a not in there somewhere (Score:2)
i.e. ... they were not focused on making a ... ... that didn't force ...
or maybe
I do agree with what I believe you intended to say.
Along with many others I switched away from GNOME(in my case to xfce) as a result of this appallingly bad decision(to seemingly abandon the desktop in favour of tablets) by the GNOME developers. So the question is how many people are using GNOME on tablets?
This is not unlike how Microsoft lost out completely on phones and made their desktop worse by trying to move everyone to a
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The key word you used was tablet!! Every time I try using it, I feel like I am using a very large tablet with a keyboard and mouse attached. I guess I am just an old fool who is very comfortable with the conventional desktop paradigm.
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Many Alternatives (Score:3)
I'm forced to use GNOME under Wayland on our online workstations at work, but at home and in my work VMs I always use something much more lightweight, like Mate or even just a standalone window manager. Something like OpenBox, i3, even MWM or TWM can be made to look and work nicely, without carrying around all of the heft and uselessness of a full DE.
Realistically most of the time I just need a terminal program, a browser and some basic graphical tools, which can be covered by GIMP, Inkscape and Blender well enough most of the time.
All that said a lot of my professional time is spent in Windows because so much professional software is only available for it. I understand the market reasons why, but man, I pine for a real, commercial market for Unix desktops again.
I like GNOME (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's like saying that vanilla is your favorite ice-cream flavor, but I really like GNOME. It works the way that I do, and I find it intuitive and elegant.
Yes, I've tried most other WMs/DEs, but always come home to GNOME. Sorry, just had to dissent from the GNOME hate.
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If GNOME works for you then by all means use it without any apologizes. Personally I have tried it several times through the years, and it just feels like I should be using a tablet...but that is just me.
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Back in the day I preferred Afterstep; when that bitrotted to the point of no longer quite working I switched to Windowmaker, and when that too fell to bitrot and ongoing integration issues with the rest of the ecosystem, I held my nose and switched to G2, where at least everything _worked_ even if it didn't map cleanly to my mental model.
When G3 landed, even in its not-quite-fully-baked 3.0 release (what, 12 years ago?) it was a breath of fresh air, mapping nearly perfectly to how I work. I haven't looked
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Starting with version 3, GNOME prioritized the preferences of its developers over the preferences of their userst.
Funny, I remember people saying the same thing about GNOME 2 versus GNOME 1.x
Yet here we are today, with GNOME 3 continuing to be the overwhelmingly most common desktop, and that's even without bundling in Cinnamon (ie G3 tech stack with a G2-ish skin) and Mate (G2 fork but using most of the modern GNOME libraries, tooling, and applications). KDE Plasma is easily in second place. ....It's almost like all the complainers in their echo chambers don't actually represent the majority of users. And with rare e
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True, although I would estimate that GNOME 3 does not command as much of the Linux marketshare as GNOME 2 did.
I wouldn't count Cinnamon and Mate in with GNOME. If anything, the fact that people felt it was worth all of the effort to create alter
Fix client-side decoration window buttons (Score:1)
And I'll contribute.
Start with GtkHeaderBar: Close button's mouse-over area doesn't extend to top-right pixel when maximized (fitts' law) [gnome.org]
This and the fact that Gtk CSD windows don't respect the DE window decorations impact all DEs.
You reap what you sow (Score:1)
Natural selection process (Score:2)
You failed to adapt, face the consequences.