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Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future
An anonymous reader writes "Havoc Pennington, lead developer of GNOME, wants to fork GNOME 3.
'So the forces of existing userbase, the easiest-to-reach future userbase, cross-platform applications, and funded development efforts are strongly pulling GNOME 2 toward conservatism. I think GNOME 3 should be a fork for that reason.'" This has been a common practice for not only many open source projects, but proprietary systems such as Solaris for major revisions, so it's not as tumultous a change as the word "fork" may imply.
I know this will sound rude. But I feel like saying it anyway. Gnome has very much been focused on becoming more userfriendly in Gnome2 and it has done this by a less-is-more approach. This has, for me, made it a lot more user-unfriendly. The simple file dialog boxes are a very good example of what I mean: They now by default open up half-opened so users will not be confused by the more advanced options in them. But the problem for me is that the advanced options are things I use every time, meaning an extra click or keyboard press every time I need to use them. There is no good reason for them to appear half-open, it is just done to make it simple. The result of this is only extra time spent using them every time to make it easier to use the first time for complete idiots. Something similar is also done with the features to make it more user-friendly: If a feature is to advanced for a beginner, they are simply removed or placed where they are completely unavailable or require a great deal of effort to use. Gnome2 has come user-friendly to the extend where it is almost impossible to use productive on a day to day basis. I seriously hope Gnome3 will be better. Not that I think I will ever use it as a main desktop again, but as I use a lot of Gnome2/GTK2 programs (like I also use KDE programs in my fluxbox) this annoy me very much.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Even though I depend on GNOME libraries for my projects (specifically PyGTK), I think this is a good thing.
The reason why is that having a bleeding-edge version that integrates things like Cairo, xcompmgr, more eye candy, etc will give us who like to have a system with all the eye candy a chance, without having to worry about adding them to GNOME 2.x and possibly disrupting users who want a no-frills desktop. When GNOME 3 becomes stable, it can replace the old version.
But moreover, the Linux desktop is at an inflection point - we're just starting to get the kind of nifty eye candy that other desktops have. GNOME 3 should be a chance to get GNOME ready for the future of the Linux desktop - using Cairo to render the GTK widgets, using Luminosity as the next GNOME window manager, etc.
Sometimes it's healthy to fork off your code and rethink some of the assumptions you made rather than having to deal with the cascading problems that can crop up when you try to muck about and fix those messy hacks we all seem to create.
Forking isn't always bad - sometimes it's necessary to eliminate cruft. If the end result is a better desktop, then that's what should be done.
It has: .desktop extensions (like Windows does with .lnk files, but without the arrow telling you it's a shortcut) allowing them to spoof regular documents with icons and everything.
* No menu editor.
* Hard coded un-overridable mime-sniffing that gets lots of things wrong (because it's foolish to even try to anticipate every single file format and code to handle them all) and then forces its will on the user (won't open some of my text files in gedit for "security" reasons).
* A file browser that defeats all that paranoid mime-sniffing "security" by hiding extensions
* Menus that scroll like win95 when very full. A menu editor and/or overflowing into columns would help a lot.
* And a continually decreasing level of configurability.
I suppose aside from that it's very good. It's the desktop environment I'm using now, and the one that I keep coming back too after repeatedly trying to dump it in favor of the alternatives.