Is It Time For a Change In GNOME Leadership? 35
Longtime Slashdot reader BrendaEM writes: Command-line aside, Cinnamon is the most effective keeper of the Linux desktop flame -- by not abandoning desktop and laptop computers. Yes, there are other desktop GUIs, such as MATE, and the lightweight Xfce, which are valuable options when low overhead is important, such as in LinuxCNC. However, among the general public lies a great expanse of office workers who need a full-featured Linux desktop.
The programmers who work on GNOME and its family of supporting applications enrich many other desktops do their more than their share. These faithful developers deserve better user-interface leadership. GNOME has tried to steer itself into tablet waters, which is admirable, but GNOME 3.x diminished the desktop experience for both laptop and desktop users. For instance, the moment you design what should be a graphical user interface with words such as "Activities," you ask people to change horses midstream. That is not to say that the command line and GUI cannot coexist -- because they can, as they do in many CAD programs.
I remember a time when GNOME ruled the Linux desktop -- and I can remember when GNOME left those users behind. Perhaps in a future, GNOME could return to the Linux desktop and join forces with Cinnamon -- so that we may once again have the year of the Linux desktop.
The programmers who work on GNOME and its family of supporting applications enrich many other desktops do their more than their share. These faithful developers deserve better user-interface leadership. GNOME has tried to steer itself into tablet waters, which is admirable, but GNOME 3.x diminished the desktop experience for both laptop and desktop users. For instance, the moment you design what should be a graphical user interface with words such as "Activities," you ask people to change horses midstream. That is not to say that the command line and GUI cannot coexist -- because they can, as they do in many CAD programs.
I remember a time when GNOME ruled the Linux desktop -- and I can remember when GNOME left those users behind. Perhaps in a future, GNOME could return to the Linux desktop and join forces with Cinnamon -- so that we may once again have the year of the Linux desktop.
XFCE (Score:3)
I don't know that I would call XFCE "low over headed' these days. I would not call it bloat-y either but with all the XFCE projects included its a full featured desktop environment with just about everything you'd expect from something that isnt specifically chasing Windows or macOS.
I have not used cinnamon in a long time, but I am really stumped as to what more than XFCE you could really want in terms of a traditional desktop experience.
The time for this (Score:2, Insightful)
has long past, IMHO. The damage they did might be irreparable.
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I am not sure. XFCE and mate exist, it is hard to imagine even if they "made gnome great again" that it would there would be a compelling reason to switch back.
That said one thing Gnome was doing was the stuff under the goffice umbrella. Most of that plugs in just fine to any GTK environment but in terms of adding to the Linux desktop experience that is an area that could still be improved.
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Agreed. The laudable praise applies to Gnome1 and Gnome2, but not to Gnome3.
AKA "Only our preferences are legitimate" (Score:4, Interesting)
Folks have been complaining about GNOME's UI choices for well over 20 years now. Guess what, it "rules the linux desktop" more today than it ever has.
Are there other, viable alternatives? Absolutely; more than ever, and you're free to use them (or not) if that's your preference.
But don't go projecting your preferences onto everyone else.
BTW, "the effective keeper of the linux desktop" is overwhelmingly Microsoft; WSL installs vastly dwarf "native" installations.
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Absolutely.
People like GNOME. People like Cinnamon. People like the Windows 95 UI.
If people want a DE from the 90s. Great they can have that. If people want a modern DE. Great, we can have that.
I just don't buy this, "Make GNOME Great Again", mentality either.
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Folks have been complaining about GNOME's UI choices for well over 20 years now. Guess what, it "rules the linux desktop" more today than it ever has.
Solid logic there bro. Keep the status quo and NEVER ask if anything could be better. A freak of chance doesn't mean the leadership is good, it just means there is not much that is better.
Honestly, since I am not paying for it, I have no right to request a change in leadership, but again, honestly, the leadership of Gnome and KDE both suck, with the leadership of Gnome sucking measurably worse.
Both groups lost their fucking minds after their version 2.0 releases. My guess is Microsoft money.
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Does it really "rule the Linux desktop", though?
I'd imagine that most "Desktop Linux" users are really using ChromeOS, which has it's own unique GUI. Ubuntu has it's own highly modified interface as well.
It will get weirder (Score:4, Interesting)
If valve keeps having success and expanding the SteamOS like they are, the future might be whatever valve chooses as the default DE
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I'm not the CIA to come up with weirdass execution plans like that
Window Managers (Score:3)
Also there is KDE. If I was forced into a Desktop Environment, right now KDE would be my choice. When (if) Wayland ever is forced on us as a real X replacement I would go to KDE.
But right now I stick with window managers and I hope the WM I use the most is ported to Wayland. But the issue is, from what I have read, writing a WM is harder on Wayland than X so many Window Managers will end up in the dustbin.
Before people bring up Sway, I do not like tiling WMs.
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There is a decent Wayland compositor called Hikari that is not a tiling manager and is pretty stable. It is particularly interesting to me because I run FreeBSD rather than Linux and Hikari is developed natively for FreeBSD. It works under Linux too of course. I like to run OpenBox for my WM, although I do like tilers also and have run dwm, i3-gaps and am considering spectrwm.
In the end though, I actually kinda despise Wayland. It is a foolish project whose target is basically to replace something that wor
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What's worst is that X has security mechanisms that nobody uses and which could have been improved to cover the problems.
The one and only reason why X is being abandoned is that the people who were working on it don't want to do that any more, they wanted to work on something new.
Fifteen years later, Wayland still doesn't do what X does.
It's impossible for me to believe that they couldn't have fixed the cruftiness of X in fifteen fucking years. They chose not to, which is their prerogative, but their lack o
looks like former X.org developers have mod points (Score:2)
Look kids, your whining has proven to be a load of dingo's kidneys. Wayland is still years from doing the things X does. X is here and working and you abandoned it to make a new thing that doesn't work
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Interesting, will have to keep Hikari in mind. It looks like cwm, which I use on OpenBSD. This should be fine for me once I am dragged into Wayland kicking and screaming :)
That day may not be too far off, I heard gtk5 will only support Wayland, dropping X.
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It's a shame that so much effort was put into replicating the Windows and Apple UIs over the years. Microsoft and Apple did a lot of damage by claiming their UIs were the most intuitive and easy to use, and convincing so many people in the process. People used to write boo
Bullshit (Score:3)
Command-line aside, Cinnamon is the most effective keeper of the Linux desktop flame -- by not abandoning desktop and laptop computers. Yes, there are other desktop GUIs, such as MATE, and the lightweight Xfce, which are valuable options when low overhead is important, such as in LinuxCNC. However, among the general public lies a great expanse of office workers who need a full-featured Linux desktop.
MATE and XFCE are fine for the vast majority of users. For everyone else who needs that last 3% of functionality there's KDE. GNOME has run its course and should be allowed to die in irrelevance for what it did to us regarding systemd.
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Hard agree. At work GNOME is forced on us as the default desktop of Debian, and man, I loathe that garbage.
It's called MATE (Score:1)
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Also weren't the needs of Gnome the reason for systemd to be foisted upon us?
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Yes, GNOME chose to depend on systemd for functionality they already had working on X, and then Debian chose to depend on systemd so they could support GNOME even though KDE was unencumbered OSS by that time and they could have gone that direction, and everyone else followed suit. Really the blame falls on GNOME first and Debian second. The claim was that the majority of Debian devs supported the decision but it is not at all clear that this was true, it looks more like the decision was pushed through on a
Touch screen has no place for real work (Score:2)
Touch screens really have no place for real work on a computer. It really only works at all on consumption only devices like phones and tablets. Ubuntu's old Unity and Gnome are just about useless for any real work. Cinnamon in my opinion truly is the best of the DE's out at the moment. My only gripe with Cinnamon is still in regards to gaming and the fact that as of yet, they still give no way to disable effects for full screen apps like games so that you can enable flipping/g-sync etc.
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You've got too narrow a focus. There are applications for which touch screens are preferable. It's just that programming sure isn't one of them.
A full-featured Linux desktop (Score:2)
Gnome is still around? (Score:1)
Speak for yourselfâ¦. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Why do you like Gnome? At one point I found Gnome2 to be my favorite desktop, but I've never seen anything worthwhile about Gnome3.
Multiple critics, all of them right (Score:1, Troll)
Installing Linux sucks (Score:1)
Installing Linux is hard, it often fails and it's complicated, no Year Of The Linux Desktop until Linux has an idiot proof installer
Windows just installs easily
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I take it by "installs easily" you mean it comes on the PC.
Otherwise it's the same build a USB stick and reboot, wipe the drive, and let the installer run as Linux. Or MacOs for that matter.
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