Is It Time For a Change In GNOME Leadership? 63
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:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Agreed. It does everything I want from a desktop environment, and does it well, and still manages to have a modest overhead. And that matters. The laptop I'm typing this on would struggle with feature-heavy desktops like Gnome, but it runs XFCE like champ.
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The time for this (Score:4, 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.
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AKA "Only our preferences are legitimate" (Score:5, 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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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.
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"WSL installs vastly dwarf "native" installations."
Cite.
Re: AKA "Only our preferences are legitimate" (Score:2)
Also how is that relevant anyway? If we're talking about the desktop that is
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Microsoft does not discolse the number of WSL installations, but anectdotally, it's well north of 100:1. Granted, that's heavily weighted towards professional developers in corporate settings where Linux is the primary (if not only) deployment platform.
It will get weirder (Score:5, 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:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Window Managers (Score:4, Informative)
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 works, and works really well. Sure it has crufty corners and what have you, it's a mature project. Wayland is quickly acquiring its own set of expected extensions (oh I'm sorry, "protocols") where the newest hotness won't work unless you have the right extensions available, which is one of the exact things the Wayland devs whined about with X. I actually think the whole model Wayland is using is wrong.
Another old and crufty system people might be familiar with would be Windows. When I write stuff for Windows in C++, I use the same API that I learned in the late '90s, and it all still works fine. Also happens to be the dominant UI in the world for personal computers.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
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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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.
The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
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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.
The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
Why would you remove older stuff exactly? There are literal decades of software that run reliably on X using stuff that the Wayland people would want to deprecate. I use xterm every day on X, and it is written using the Xt toolkit, basically the first UI toolkit to be released for X from the '80s. I also run and build software from the 90s written using Motif, even NEW software written for Motif. Mature stuff should be left as-is unless some issue is discovered, then it should be fixed.
The problem with open
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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.
The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
Why would you remove older stuff exactly? There are literal decades of software that run reliably on X using stuff that the Wayland people would want to deprecate.
The problem with open-source software in general is that unless a company is paying for development, generally contributors only work on things that are personally interesting to them, which often doesn't include taking care of old software written decades ago in styles that are no longer fashionable, even when those pieces of old software are foundational to a system's operation. Note that the vast, vast majority of contributors to the Linux kernel are full-time paid developers from companies who use Linux.
I didn't say "older stuff", I said "everything that nobody uses today".
If an old offline production system never updated still requires some obscure X feature, that's fine because it would never be updated to use X12 or Wayland.
If it does require that feature, then the company will hire a developer to maintain X11.
It's going to be hilarious in another decade or two when C and C++ are still primary languages and Rust has been replaced by Zig or whatever sexy thing comes after that one, heh.
I don't think developers are paid to develop in Rust because it's trendy. I would say it's trendy because the risk of security vulnerabilities and crashes of Rust code is much lower.
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I don't think developers are paid to develop in Rust because it's trendy. I would say it's trendy because the risk of security vulnerabilities and crashes of Rust code is much lower.
I would argue they are absolutely paid to program in Rust because it is currently trendy to do so. There are a number of "safe" system programming languages that will reduce the risks for security vulnerabilities, including programming languages like Ada where the compiler enforces the guarantees. There are also numerous methods or techniques of programming in "dangerous" languages like C which have been developed over time, things like the MISRA standards, which if compliance were guaranteed the quality of
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The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
So why is it still not working properly 15 years later?
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
X is modular so that's not a problem.
Got any actual problems to report? I don't believe the first point since it still sucks 15 years on. I flatly do not believe they are further along with this solution than they could have been with cleaning up the codebase of X.org after a decade and a half.
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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:5, Insightful)
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:2, Troll)
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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
Re: It's called MATE (Score:2)
I agree, but the problem with mate is that it still suffers from gnome's bullshit, because it depends on gtk, and when gnome devs vandalize it, it eventually ends up in mate.
The big feature loss for me was the ability to change tab by scrolling on the tabs. It worked in menus, in caja, basically everywhere there was gtk tabs.
One moron with power was surprised once by it, and decided to remove it, because it "can confuse people and some people have sensitive mouse wheels".
He supposedly asked on gnome's irc 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.
Re: Touch screen has no place for real work (Score:2)
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Where did you see "desktop machine"? I missed that. For a desktop machine (that isn't a convertible) I agree with you.
A full-featured Linux desktop (Score:3)
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Indeed, what is the definition of "full-featured"? Wallpaper? Taskbar? "That's nice" or "looks cool" but useless desktop gadgets? Distracting pop-ups or taskbar animations? Animated advertising in menu, taskbar, and window title bars? What?
My desktop is complete with having only a pop-up program list that I call via key combination and the ability for virtual desktops, nothing else. Okay, one could count the digital clock tucked away in the corner as part of it. It's the same for why I use the simple and c
Gnome is still around? (Score:1)
Speak for yourselfâ¦. (Score:5, 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)
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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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If only.
I ended up installing Ubuntu, MacOS and Windows in close succession recently. Ubuntu and MacOS were as you describe. Windows though... someone's mother bought an ASUS laptop and the Windows setup froze, so they asked me to reinstall it for them. Okay, no problem. Nope, still froze. No explanation, no way out, not even an error message. The Ubuntu install I replaced it with went fine though.
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I hate to say anything positive about Windows, but I've install both Linux and Windows in the past year into VMs and both were painless. So painless I can't even remember anything in particular about either installation.
Also, XFCE for me please. KDE was cute when I first started dabbling with Linux decades ago as it "looked" similar to Windows. Then I kept toying with other distros and discovered there are lots of choices. I like the clean, simpleness of XFCE. It doesn't offer up any distractions like some
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On two identical computers with blank hard drives, Linux is WAY easier to install than Windows.
So much this!
You typically download the distro you desire with the desktop you desire, Rufus it into an installable ISO, boot and choose to install, make certain it is attached to the internet, and let 'er rip.
Another thing - Linux at least so far doesn't turn older drivers into unobtanium. I've had a good bit of that problem in Windows.
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Re: Installing Linux sucks (Score:2)
exactly. I've been installing multiple machines every year for 20 years.
I can't remember the last time it was harder than plug usb, click ok,ok,ok. and wait for the reboot.
The hardest install i have done of the last 20 years were using discs down the interstate on a laptop. That was in 2009; good times!
Gnome is why a schedule is important (Score:1)
I know people gripe about it, but Gnome being released on a consistent basis. Every 6 months, there's a new version of gnome. This syncs up nicely with major distros, and gives a way to actually plan to update for companies. Even if you absolutely loathe how dumbed down it is, being able to plan ahead and plot when you'll update is fine.
You're a couple extensions from making gnome look like a mac book, which is where lots of their designers escaped from. Your dock and desktop files are easy enough to add ba
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Also gnome is designed with sane defaults and is very hard for a novice to mess up in a way that stops them from working. KDE is awesome and easy to customize, so your random user with no computer experience will break it in horrifying ways, this makes Gnome nice for corporate environments.
This command launched on login makes it much harder: /PlasmaShell evaluateScript "lockCorona(true)"
qdbus6 org.kde.plasmashell
[Citation needed] (Score:1)
A think piece without the convincing the reader of a point part. Slow news day?
Whatever. (Score:3)
I've used GNOME since early 2.x. GNOME 3 was a big shift. But so what?
Current GNOME looks and works great on my desktop and laptop. I can launch whatever I need quickly. I can manage workspaces and windows and files. It gets out of the way. Do I think their insistence on no tray icons is stupid? Yep, but it doesn't matter, there's an extension for that. Does it work with touch devices? Yep. But I don't care because I don't use touch devices with it. Does their Online Accounts thing work in a corp environment? Not really. Oh well.
Like, I barely think about GNOME. It's just there doing its job. It's FINE. It works. It looks nice. I have no major complaints.
The only people it "left behind" were users who thought early Windows was peak UI, didn't have the neuroplasticity to try something new, and thought the project owed them something in return for using it.
Again, oh well.
Perhaps (Score:2)
Perhaps Papa Smurf could lead the Gnomes in a new direction? He somehow led an entire group of Smurfs peacefully with only one Smurfette .. quite an accomplishment!
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Perhaps Papa Smurf could lead the Gnomes in a new direction? He somehow led an entire group of Smurfs peacefully with only one Smurfette .. quite an accomplishment!
She was happy but tired.