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Putting this forth as a real consideration, to anyone reading: Who uses those widgets anyway?

Okay, fair enough, I'm sure many do - from years of habit, muscle memory, and the visual gravitation towards those widgets. Why are these widgets still necessary, though?

Fitt's law proves that a widget is easier to click, proportional to it's surface area. Given their small size, it explains why I find them cumbersome. I am more likely to:

- use keyboard shortcuts
- Alt + Space / Alt + rmb to access the context menu
- rmb the window drag-bar to access the ctm

Alt + Space is the most universal, and a great choice when jumping between different OS's and DM's.
Hey, I don't care if they keep the buttons, I just don't think I'll notice even if they do remove them.

+1 for speaking your mind not as AC :-D

Here is an example of your two-faced hypocrisy: According to you share means to make a copy of something and give the copy away rather than to let someone else use your copy. Then you complain that the other words I listed have two meanings. To you, share has two meanings as well. So stop whining, you little bitch.

So, you don't believe the copyright holder is entitled to anything. So you have no problem if people violate the GPL right? After all, if the copyright holder isn't entitled to anything, then FLOSS supporters are not entitled to anything either.

Gnome has two important faces. From the user's perspective, it is an integrated desktop environment and application suite.
From the announcement of KDEAn integrated Desktop Environment for the Unix Operating SystemYou were saying, asshole?

Actually, it is you and RMS who are claiming to know the truth, specifically the superiority of FLOSS.

Oh, please, do you have to keep lying? Your mind was made up and will never change because you are too busy drinking the koolaid of RMS. Apparently the only thing that constitutes a good case to you is "It is better to use a crappy tool that I consider free rather than a good tool that will do the job better and easier but I don't consider free." RMS' entire philosophy is based on his own selfishness. He wants something under his terms and only his terms and if he can't have it that way, it is evil and must be denigrated and destroyed. He goes around preaching his gospel to the likes of you, who are too stupid to see what it really is. Then you try to argue how much better FLOSS is and when confronted with the truth, try to change the discussion. You make an analogy and when it shown to be false, you say "That is not what I said". You say something, and when proven wrong you say "That is not what I meant." You point to the handful of moderately successful FLOSS projects, which are invariably backed by corporate interests, as proof that all FLOSS is great and wonderful. And, when it is pointed out that the rest of the FLOSS projects are a vast smoking ruin that no average user would want to actually use, you act as though that doesn't matter. Face it, skippy, you are just a brainwashed fool for whom there would never be enough evidence. For you FLOSS is a religion and you have blind faith in it.

Accessibility is a top priority for GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice and LibreOffice and many other major projects. Smaller projects often lack the resources to properly implement full accessibility. But then, so does the vast majority of smaller proprietary software.

Nobody mentioned evince ? It makes a good, open-source alternative to Adobe PDF reader on Windows

Official Evince for Windows MSI.

That's bullshit, you look at the bug list and you see all sorts of pointer object mashing bugs.

I'm sure it would be easy to provide references. Have any?

Strong evidence of the ineffectual nature of GObject is how limited the OOP is in that system. Collection classes anybody ?

Yup.

You should have just eaten it and use one language like Objective C that would have allowed for migration of existing code since it's still C but with a proper dynamic messaging system. I've made this point for years but the nits in GNOME community just don't fucking get it while investing tons of work into a deadend technology like C# for these purposes

The GNOME developers don't use C# as far as I'm concerned, unless you mean the Mono crowd which stands a little on the side.

Pretty sure you're saying the same thing, but just to make things really clear.

From http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/Membership:

The release team is not directly elected, but should be representative of the GNOME community. Membership is normally by invite and recommendation when one person leaves. In theory, the GNOME Foundation board has the power to select its members and influence its decisions, but they usually don't fix stuff if it isn't broken. Not more than two release-team members can directly or indirectly have the same affiliate (similar to section 2.d of the GNOME foundation bylaws).

Red Hat did not place anyone on the release-team. Matthias Clasen was invited. The only way Red Hat made that happen is because 1) Matthias rocks 2) he works for Red Hat. I think this matches with what you wrote, but just want to make it really clear.

For those without the patience to read this article (which is much longer than I intended it to be when I started!), here are the headline points:

-FreeDesktop.org is broken as a standards body
-Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t understand how GNOME works
-GNOME is not easy to understand
-Deep mistrust has developed between Canonical, GNOME & KDE
-Difficult people are prominent in each of these projects
-Behind closed doors conversations are poison
-For people to work together, they need to be in the same place

Pulled from http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/11/lessons-learned/

i'm a gnome user (in that i use the gnome panel[1] and most of the GUI apps i use are gnome) but i switched to the openbox window manager several years ago because the "standard" gnome window managers metacity and mutter absolutely suck. even worse than the software is the attitude ("design philosophy" if you want to be fancy) behind them - that taking away features is a Good Thing because users are too stupid to understand them and easily confused by choices.

this latest idiocy is just an extension of the initial practical reason i started using openbox - middle-click and right-click on the maximise button for vertical-only and horizontal-only maximise of a window. IIRC, after some argument a few years ago, the metacity devs agreed to add (or keep, i can't remember) the vert-max and horiz-max features, but refused to enable them via middle- or right- click on the max button....the ONLY way to access them is to manually configure the keyboard bindings to assign a key to them.

the gnome terminal, actually vte, also has an annoying broken-by-design bug of sending eight up/down arrow keys to the application running in the terminal when the scroll wheel is moved. the devs flat out refuse to acknowledge that this causes problems for programs like mutt and vi, and refuse to fix, and messes up middle-button pasting (because the scroll wheel is usually also the middle button, and it's almost impossible to click it without scrolling it a little at first) - even though several patches have been submitted over the years that the bug has been in the gnome bugzilla. because of this, i use mrxvt rather than gnome terminal - which, of course, has its own bugs but at least the dev doesn't suffer from the Gnome Developer Attitude Problem.

gnome has a lot of good software, but it also has a lot of rage-inducing idiocy like the above.

[1] the gnome panel annoys me too - buggy bloated crap. i've looked around for something to replace it with but haven't found one yet.

There is a bug in GNOME which screws up the window manager if you double click the title bar.
Noted here:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436537
"clicking in upper right corner closes window in background - very unexpected"

Very frustrating and GNOME is doing the wrong thing.

I suppose it will be good to remove the other buttons so that more people experience this, and hence a fix can be found.

just look at linux GUI's just a rip of, of Windows.

-1 uninformed, at best
Classic Gnome with customization
Gnome Shell (useful screenshot)
Enlightenment (no screenshots on official site)
GNUstep
Fluxbox
Xfce

To continue on-topic: wasn't it just last week when we noted that the Windows Phone marketplace specifically excludes GPL software?

What's with the double line spacing, /.?

just look at linux GUI's just a rip of, of Windows.

-1 uninformed, at best
Classic Gnome with customization
Gnome Shell (useful screenshot)
Enlightenment (no screenshots on official site)
GNUstep
Fluxbox
Xfce

To continue on-topic: wasn't it just last week when we noted that the Windows Phone marketplace specifically excludes GPL software?

What's with the double line spacing, /.?

not everyone has outlook,

So use Thunderbird or Mutt or Mulberry or Evolution or Alpine or hell how about any of the others in this list under freeware or open source.

Email is based on open standards. There are hundreds of email clients if you are willing to take the time to look for them, and all of them (arguably) are better than Outlook.

The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking, and adding buttons that can be clicked just confuses.

I'd phrase that as "less sophisticated users"; I suspect many of the more sophisticated users who are "non-technical" understand context menus.

There's also a menu up top already with all the same things and more... when should I use which?

Use the menu button if 1) the thing you want to do is, or might be, on the context menu and 2) you don't want to have to move the mouse to get a menu.

The second reason is that Apple selling a single-button mouse (not sure if they still do though)

That depends on what you call a "button"; the only mouse I see is the Magic Mouse.

forces UI designers to make their products single-button navigable.

No, because Command+Click pops up a contextual menu, just as right-click does in several other GUIs. Yes, they say "Always ensure that contextual menu items are also available as menu commands. A contextual menu is hidden by default and a user might not know it exists, so it should never be the only way to access a command. In particular, you should not use a contextual menu as the only way to access an advanced or power-user feature.", which I agree with - on any GUI, even those used on systems with multi-button mice. The GNOME people agree with that ("Since the user may not be aware of their presence, do not provide functions that are only accessible from popup menus unless you are confident that your target users will know how to use popup menus."), and so does Microsoft ("Don't make commands only available through context menus. Like shortcut keys, context menus are alternative means of performing commands and choosing options. For example, a Properties command is also available through the menu bar or the Alt+Enter access key.").

Epiphany (GNOME browser) already offers to hide address bar.

One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.

Maybe I'm alone here, but I won't use Evolution until it supports recurring tasks. And since that particular bug has gone unclosed for over eleven years, I'm not holding my breath. Well, not anymore.

NVDA? Microsoft Windows only.

Of course it is, it's a SCREEN READER. It only has to interface with the seedy belly of whatever windowing system it happens to be on. And Mac OS X and Linux do it completely differently.

http://live.gnome.org/LSR For linux. And after Leopard, screen reading is built into Mac OS.

Or you could just run Evince, which surprisingly works great under Windows. Both Evince and Okular use Poppler as the PDF backend, so the rendering should be the same, but Evince doesn't require the bloat of the entire KDE on Windows package.
I've used the official Adobe reader (yech!), Sumatra (poor rendering, performance and stability), Foxit (nag nag nag) and Evince. Evince is the best one by far.

The start/all-programs menu for Win7 is vastly superior to XP

Nonetheless, both are near-unusable entanglements of chaos and irrational design. Contrast to Gnome's applications menu , which properly arranges all programs by category first, and alphabetical order next. Now that is how you design a good user interface: neat, logical, hierarchized.

I think this is the glib comment you were looking for: http://git.gnome.org/browse/glib/tree/glib/glib.h?id=2.26.0#n20

They seem to be planning changes. But I don't like their plans:

http://www.deansas.org/blog/2009/09/24/first-impressions-of-gnome-shell/

One of the main changes to my mind is that it does not have a window list on a panel. You switch applications by visiting the Activity "overlay" and then clicking on the window you wish to switch to. This doesn't really affect me much in practise, I usually use alt+tab to switch windows anyway, where it does affect me is for applications that change the window title, e.g. messenger or gmail, I now have to cycle through alt+tab to check for people replying to me etc.

Rather than a window list the panel now lists the name of the currently focused application. It seems a bit useless, most applications have the application name as part of the window list and I'm not likely to forget the name of an application I've started.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2010-November/msg00030.html

Just wanted to share a personal experience with GNOME Shell. One of its new and unique attributes is not having the window list or any sort of persistent widget that shows running apps or opened windows. This has benefits, in theory, like helping the user focus on the foreground task.

It's just worth noting that one of its potential downsides is it violates the user's mental model, which makes it undesirable, even if it *may* help increase productivity. With a window list, it's clear to the user where the window goes when it's minimized and how to show it again. In GNOME Shell, the only clear way to tell if a window is minimized is to check if it can't be seen in the workspace, but it's shown in the Overview or Window Switcher (alt+tab). Teling which windows are minimized or not may not have real benefits, but it may be too disorienting for users.

Personally I think they've lost their marbles. How does that help productivity at all? Especially in the cases where you need to use more than one window to do your work?

Evince is also available for windows. It seems to work better than Sumatra in my limited usage so far. http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Downloads

I'm personally hoping someone will come up with an open-source implementation of C# not based on the .NET libraries or the Mono toolkit, but a pure native-code compiler, with selectable manual or automatic memory management.

Your requirements are contradictory.

With respect to "selectable manual or automatic memory management" - that would require an extension of the language, since, as defined by the spec, it assumes automatic memory management. All of the existing code, including the standard libraries, assumes so as well, so you cannot reuse it. Heck, even the standard library APIs kinda assume it, since they often do not specify whether transfer of ownership occurs or not where it would be important with automatic memory management.

Pure native-code compiler is doable while remaining strictly to the letter of C# spec, but as soon as you wade into the neighboring CLR realm, you'll need either a bytecode interpreter or a JIT-compiler - due to existence of things such as System.Reflection.Emit which enable on-the-fly code generation - and which are used in existing code.

Anyway, if you want a new language which takes quite a lot of good ideas from C# (including a fair bit of syntax), but which is native-compiled, produces libraries which are directly consumable from C, and for which Unix is a native environment - look at Vala.

I've not known that Reader is directly linked to Flash, but I've never trusted Reader either as it too is riddled with holes. Thus I recommend using Evince if you're on Windows, it's fast, clean and supports the most important functions fine.

As an aside, every time I have to fix a friend's PC or set up a new one I install Firefox on it, Adblock+ and FlashBlock, remove Reader and replace it with Evince. Simple, but seemingly efficient; I haven't had to go and remove any viruses from them after doing that. Most viruses and malware people get on their machines are via drive-by attacks hidden in Flash animations or ads and thus blocking ads and Flash works wonders.

For those interested: http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Downloads

Huh didn't know there was a Windows port of evince. I'll have to look at replacing Foxit with that:

http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Downloads

And an .MSI installer too! I'll have to talk with the other IT guys at work tomorrow...

This is one of the areas where I with the open source movement were more pro-active. Why isn't there already an open source Java/.net-alike?

There are plenty. E.g. all those Smalltalk implementations. The problem is that they never get popular.

That said, Vala is quite interesting, and seems to be getting popular lately. It's not a VM-based language - rather it compiles to C - but it does have automatic memory management (reference counting, handled behind the scenes by the compiler) and is memory-safe to the same extent as C# (most constructs are safe, those which are unsafe are deliberately distinct). And, in general, it borrows a lot from C# syntax-wise.

The nice part about it is that it uses GLib object model, so it can readily use any existing C library written against that, and any Vala library is immediately usable from C.

Semantics is fun. As someone said: a word to the wise is often enough to start an argument.

The GNOME desktop has had three (possibly four depending on your flaky-code compile skillz) different window managers: enlightenment, sawfish, metacity, and soon GNOME-shell.

Does running nautilus desktop manager, gnome-panel, gnome-screensaver all under gnome-session make your desktop not GNOME because you use compiz?

For purists, yes because the 'GNOME desktop' is a certain list of software released by the GNOME project. If you're not running exactly that software you're not running the 'GNOME desktop.'

Realistically, no because distros and Linux-from-scratch people can bundle all sorts of things not on offical lists and call it the 'GNOME desktop' when they really mean is a bunch of gtk+ software that may or may not be running as a child process of gnome-session.

I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.

GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.

I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.

GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.

I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.

GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.

I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.

GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.

I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.

GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.

For music I simply id3 tag them (Picard ftw), and for photos I use Tracker tags.

I don't have many videos, but I suppose I could use Tracker too.

Many people *do* use Ooo for real word use in the real world.

I actually like Gnumeric better for some spreadsheeting [1] better than Ooo Calc. http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/

[1] Note that verbing is cool!

Can libreoffice stay relevant without coorperate backing?

If they do not spawn developers like mad (which is kinda hard given OOo's nontrivial codebase): not a chance.

The Document Foundation has done a lot more for OO.org than Oracle will ever do. It's a crime that Oracle is allowed to have their clutches on it.

wrong.

Let's just take ekiga as an example, though any gnome app will do.

The state machine is tightly coupled with the UI just like a Windows application. As a result making it use multiple CPUs properly or reusing the code for anything other than another Gnome application is impossible. Not surprisingly it triggers races in underlying (similarly badly coded) libraries like there is no tomorrow. Same for having the UI stripped away. This is impossible.

That's why GNOME has switched to Empathy, just another GNOME app but done right.

And it should be observed that Evince is also available for Windows and is under the GPLv2.

Sumatra's minimalistic and lacks some functionality, if you want the honest appraisal- the dev site openly admits not everything renders correctly. Evince seems to be pretty solid when it comes to rendering content correctly. I've yet to find a document that didn't view and print as the author of the document had intended.

I use Evince for Windows. Haven't had a problem yet.

http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Downloads

Way ahead of you.
http://live.gnome.org/OMG
https://projecthamster.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/gnome-achievements-the-alternative/

Who needs virtual desktops when you can have multiple monitors? Too bad linux does not support them out of box (i.e., without tricking with command prompt)

Welcome to the future. (5 years ago)

Okay, i'd not go as far as adding the windows logo and microsoft copyrighted styling, but you have to admit: The windows themed one looks a *lot* better than the default theme of gnome which feels a bit '90s http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.30/figures/rnusers.nautilus.png.en_GB vs http://gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre2/113264-2.jpg

Unless your are behind a proxy server:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602824

thus the "the basic functionality seems to be there", have you posted your wish on the user mailing list like the link i used said to?

No, but I searched GNOME Bugzilla and found someone else's request. What's the next step? Coding it myself?

AisleRiot (also known as Solitaire or sol) is a collection of card games which are easy to play with the aid of a mouse. The rules for the games have been coded for your pleasure in the GNOME scripting language (Scheme). It is part of the gnome-games package.

The following games can be selected from within the program, or by using a command line switch:

Agnes Athena Auld Lang Syne Aunt Mary Backbone Bakers Dozen Bakers Game Beleaguered Castle Block Ten Bristol Camelot Canfield Carpet Chessboard Clock Cover Cruel Diamond Mine Doublets Eagle Wing Easthaven Eight Off Elevator Escalator First Law Fortress Fortunes Fourteen Freecell Gaps Gay Gordons Glenwood Golf Gypsy Helsinki Hopscotch Isabel Jamestown Jumbo Kansas King Albert Kings Audience Klondike Labyrinth Lady Jane Maze Monte Carlo Neighbor Odessa Osmosis Peek Pileon Plait Poker Quatorze Royal East Saratoga Scorpion Scuffle Seahaven Sir Tommy Spiderette Spider One Suit Spider Spider Two Suit Straight Up Streets And Alleys Template Ten Across Thieves Thirteen Thumb And Pouch Treize Triple Peaks Union Square Valentine Westhaven Whitehead Will O The Wisp Yield Yukon Zebra

I don't think all your examples are good and I believe there is some mis-attribution in there as well. Let's start with the ones that might support your argument. PulseAudio (Lennart Poettering), DeviceKit (David Zeuthen) and gnome-user-share (Alexander Larsson and Bastien Nocera) were all created by Red Hat employees. I would argue that neither Xorg/X, DeviceKit or PulseAudio are part of GNOME even though it runs on top of them. They are really Linux desktop infrastructure and someone's got to develop that...

Compiz was not developed inside GNOME but parachuted in from outside and sadly stalled. It is close to metacity but it wound up coming with its own set of quirks that exposed new problems in applications.

If you actually look back at the XGL/AIGLX history you will find that it wasn't just Red Hat devs (such as Adam Jackson) who didn't want to adopt it - NVIDIA believed it was the wrong direction as it prevented the hardware exposing certain features. Strangely enough, Ubuntu was probably the first major distro to ship XGL and compiz in a release, much to the chagrin of some in the SUSE community. It is worth noting that KDE didn't adopt compiz as their default window manager either.

Clutter was created by employees of a company called Open Handed which was later bought by Intel. I assume you mentioned this as the GNOME 3 gnome-shell window manager will use this library for compositing purposes.

GNOME Cheese was developed by Daniel G. Siegel when he was a student as part of Google's Summer of Code 2007 project and his mentor was Raphaël Slinckx (who currently appears to work for a company called Whatever SA).

The problem with the parent post is that it pointed to a couple of areas where GNOME has accepted "Red Hat outsiders" in, which weakens its argument. Could the situation be less extreme than it painted if such confusion can occur?

Red Hat - 70790 commits [1]
Canonical - 4487 commits [1]

Red Hat - 3200 emplyees [2]
Canonical - 350 employees [3]

Red Hat - 1993 (we take GNOME - 1999) [2]
Canonical - 2004 [3]

Red Hat - 2.01 (commits / employee / year)
Canonical - 2.13 (commits / employee / year)

So you tell me - who is giving more to GNOME ?
The correct answer is: we don't know. If we take only one variable (commits), Red Hat is obviously in the lead. If we take two more variables (number of employees and years of contribution), Canonical takes the lead. Is it humanely possible to take into consideration every single variable out there ? I don't think so. So what are we quarrelling about ? Let's commit some code to GNOME instead.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hat
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME

Didn't you think about checking to see if the situation might have changed?

I apologize. Does anyone know which version of Fedora readmitted the Tetris clones?

It's not also not called gnometris, but quadrapassel.

I was aware of the rename, but in some people's minds, that's not enough. Last year, The Tetris Company sued Biosocia, maker of a Tetris clone called Blockles. They settled with Biosocia agreeing to replace Blockles with a different game (also called Blockles) based on Sega's Puyo Pop instead of Tetris. And then again, someone else might have a problem with the name "Quadrapassel".

... like a functional screensaver dialog?

It's not hard to "keep up".