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The Full Story Behind the Canonical vs. GNOME Drama
supersloshy writes this followup to our Thursday discussion of friction between Canonical and GNOME:
"I've seen a lot of GNOME bashing for various reasons here on Slashdot as well as several other websites. The problem with all of this is that you never hear GNOME's side of the situation, making a lot of disrespectful comments about GNOME (or the others involved) rather baseless and illogical. Dave Neary has an extremely thorough blog post which details problems on all sides that make the issue much more complicated than 'GNOME is being idiotic by not accepting our technology.' The points covered in the blog post include, among others, how Freedesktop.org is broken as a standards body, that Mark Shuttleworth doesn't understand how GNOME works, that GNOME is not easy to understand, and that open discussions from the very beginning are important for specification development and adoption. Another blog post by 'Sankar' also covers similar points while defending GNOME."
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/
In the end, they're both going to be irrelevant. GNOME shell is too late, and doing it their own way, going further away from what most people want in a desktop, and Unity is already outdated when you compare it to what's happening in the tablet world.
So a pox on both their houses. They sort of deserve each other.
Seriously. I respect KDE and everything but I don't want to work with a playskool desktop manager.
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
It doesn't. That's why people working remote often go visit the people they are working with, or at least they have one person who does if there are a group of them.
Telecommuting works because there is a buffer of understanding built up by in-person meetings and actions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gnome weren't interested? If it matters to Canonical so much, why not just contribute the necessary support into the core libs? Refactor the gnome library so it supports both the gnome way of doing things and this new-fangled KDE/unity way and can be pluggable. Strict Gnome implementations can do it their way or link your lib.
If Ubuntu Gnome desktop (even running gnome-shell) is nicer that official Gnome, your fork will be adopted by other distros and thus 'win'.
blog post 1 and blog post 2.
Enjoy.
-chris
As pointed out in the Dave Neary's blog post, the same issues of opaque communication, people who are hard to deal with, and difficulty in implementing system-wide changes exist in KDE and many other open source projects. It's not limited to Gnome or Ubuntu.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If I remember correctly, Trolls get a +3 when bashing Gnome.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Its not like windows, but all of the layouts i have seen (default and opensuse being the main ones) are somewhat obvious where everything is and extra features are pretty easy to ignore. Is the multiple desktops that are confusing or the bar on top?
KDE also has some confusing interface differences form windows in some of its applications. Such as the default single click opening of files and folders.
I am a long time gnome user and i never heard complain that the layout is confusing.
Or did i miss the part that is about gnome 3?
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
Poorly in most cases. Telecommuting can work in some cases but only for cases where the need to communicate is either minimal or well defined. I've telecommuted (worked from home) and I'm nowhere near as productive. Most jobs involve a significant amount of communication and it is MUCH easier to communicate in person. Emails and phone calls are great but there is no substitute for face to face communication and close proximity when collaborating on a project. There are exceptions where telecommuting works great but they are and will remain exceptions for most of us.
Difficult people are behind every project it is called pride, get over it
There is pride and there is arrogance and they are not the same thing. Being proud of what you have done doesn't give you or anyone else the right to be a jerk.
Mistrust develops because one side does all the work while the other complains about it.
Mistrust is caused by many things. Every argument has two sides and in almost every case both sides have a least some (though rarely equal) legitimacy to their arguments. People are political animals by nature and if they aren't able to talk about what they are doing AND their motivations for doing so in an efficient manner, mistrust is the inevitable result.
After seeing similar dramas play out in other high profile FOSS projects over the years, it makes me wonder if this is how all semi-successful FOSS projects eventually end up. Politics exist in any organization, but at least in software development corporations, people have incentives to try to work things out. This certainly doesn't help the case for Linux on the desktop.
To be honest, I used to use gnome a bit, and KDE, but I've found that they're both just way too much. I don't need or use most of the stuff they insist on installing. One of the things that I'm digging about Archlinux is that they aren't forcing you to install anything in particular as a WM.
Frankly, seeing how Ubuntu totally gimped gdm-setup, removed the ability to use remote-x and a chooser and other such *digressions* they've implemented, I'm on Gnome's side.
I don't use ubuntu but I support a bunch of people who do, and usually recommend xubuntu, which has the xfce4 desktop. Ubuntu users might want to get familiar with it now so that when gnome follows kde in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory you'll be undisturbed. sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop for ubuntu or kubuntu users.
Caveat Utilitor
KDE is interesting and all but GNOME lets me actually get work done; it wasn't designed to appeal to a 3-year-old.
Its not about pretty interface. It is about easy to use interface, and less options, mean less chance the interface will fit you. Remember that peoples are different, remember that small fact, that tends to be forgotten. Something that is easy/intuitive for one user, isn't for another and vise versa. Settings is exactly that, they allow the computer to be fitted for the user needs. If user doesn't know how to use them, then he uses defaults, just like in case of no settings.
KDE is interesting and all but GNOME lets me actually get work done; it wasn't designed to appeal to a 3-year-old.
Indeed. I have myself tried KDE every now and then, all the way from KDE 3.x, and I still don't quite like it. It feels like they are simply trying to include way too much stuff and every imaginable configuration option. GNOME on the other hand feels much more consistent and clean and thus it suits my taste much better. I have only wished they'd switch over to Qt because it's quite a bit more powerful than GTK+, but in such a way as to keep the current feel to it all.
However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new. It would be a different matter if it was somehow more powerful and efficient than my current one, but it isn't.
Oh well.
Just a few days ago, we were told that everyone is bashing Ubuntu and then a couple days later, we all bashed the crap out of Ubuntu regarding news about their interactions with GNOME. Now we're being told that we're bashing GNOME, even though we were bashing Ubuntu/Canonical all week?
Anyway, when I do need to use Ubuntu, I opt for XUBUNTU.
Window Maker rocks!
http://windowmaker.org/
Rocks my eyes with utter fuglyness...
Dave Neary has an extremely thorough blog post which details problems on all sides that make the issue much more complicated than 'GNOME is being idiotic by not accepting our technology.'
Let's cut the chase: does GNOME provide an alternative notification area spec?
From all written, I can really comment only on the part about "fd.o is broken as a standards body". And all I can say is that pretty much all standard bodies work like that: they rely on cooperation. GNOME didn't take part in talk and later sent list of complaints - instead of drafting new (version of) spec. And GNOME has stopped there, at sending complaints. Standards and specs are not immovable targets, while apparently GNOME childishly refuses to take part in the process by only complaining and calling it "broken." Or I miss something?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Leaving aside the question of whether it's good for an open source project to have macho leadership, I think the comparison with Linux (the kernel) isn't valid. Linux, as every slashgeek well knows, is ruled by benevolent dictator. What Linus wants, Linux gets. Or you fork the kernel, which is what most everybody does. I think the last Gnome BD was a guy named Miguel, who has since gone on to other interests.
But perhaps more substantively, Linux differs from Gnome in that Gnome tends to be modular, while Linux is modular only in the sense you can do "modprobe fu ; rmmod bar". So even if Linux didn't have Linus, people are forced by the monolithic nature of the kernel to be more careful with the bits they insert or remove from the kernel. Modifying the kernel is a more surgical operation when compared to the more Lego-like nature of Gnome.
Gnome's modular nature thus makes casual forking (as practiced by Canonical, et al) easier than it is in projects of a more monolithic nature like Linux and, to a lesser extent, KDE.
Am I the only one finding myself increasingly detached from caring about the desktop shell anyhow? It's like, can we just replace the whole desktop shell with a browser and be done with it (even if all the apps are still served from localhost)?
One of the many reasons why I would never consider using an OS other than Linux these days is that on Windows or MacOS there is no (realistic) choice as to which desktop you're going to run. I use fluxbox. My wife and daughter use Gnome. I've used xfce on low-end hardware sometimes. Some people like KDE.
If Gnome has problems, just don't use it. It's not a big deal. Apt-get install fluxbox, or apt-get install xfce4, or whatever desktop you like.
Find free books.
Yes, but it makes no sense to make things annoying for 90% of people to please the other 10%, when those 10% can change things to the way they want anyway.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know how to configure wmaker. It's as fugly or beautiful as you make it. Fluxbox is extremely good as well.
Caveat Utilitor
We're a disaster, but I can point out defects in others, therefore everything's fine!
However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new.
Yeah, it is annoying how they keep taking functionality out when there's no rational justification in terms of usability. My 11-year-old daughter was running Gnome on Ubuntu Lucid, and she had her login screen all customized so it looked cool according to her 11-year-old criteria. Then I upgraded her to Maverick, and her customization went away. I spent some time trying to help her get it working again, and basically learned that it's impossible (or would require more wizardry than I possess). Try explaining to an 11-year-old why an upgrade has removed a feature that she was using and wanted. Is there some usability improvement due to removing this capability for customization? Of course not.
But that's the beauty of open source. We have fluxbox, xfce, KDE, ...
Find free books.
OK, I thought that was bad, but they have a reason. They want people to use desktop pagers instead of maximize and minimize. After I read that, I tried it out to see what was so great, and indeed, having a separate pager for each project you're working on is amazing. So if it works like they expect, they will be pushing a lot of people to a better world (it drives me crazy when I see someone with a 21 inch monitor who maximizes every single window and uses the task bar to switch between them. Totally defeats the point of a large monitor).
Overall I'd rather have those buttons included, but I rarely use them anyway.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Jeff Waugh worked at Canonical until 2006 and was a member of the GNOME board until 2008. Since then he hasn't had a role in either project. He's been pumping out a series of blog posts cover this whole saga for the last few days.
Part 1
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-canonical-gnome/
Part 2
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/thoughts-on-gnome/
Part 3
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/the-libappindicator-story/
Part 4
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/13/love-flies-under-the-radar/
The biggest trouble I have with gnome is the designers constant push to force me using my computer their way 'for my own good'. No, sorry, I won't, thank you very much. I've used almost every other GUI / desktop manager around, none has tried so constantly to take away my freedom to organize the way I want to work. To add insult to injury, Gnome color schemes and icon design always seem to lag 10 years behind current fashion. Gnome reminds me of my childhood in the cold war era. Although I was born in western europe, it feels like soviets are rolling their tank divisions through my computer. You wait months in a line waiting for next release, just to hear : 'there's no more resize button, get away, and if you're not happy, praise tell me, comrade, why would you need one ? Didn't you know resize buttons are antisocial ?'. And you end up living in a concrete shack, decorated by shades of gray, praising the vision of the komintern. Just say no.
I am in desktop overload. Between the Mac re-inventing the concept of "pointless flash," Microsoft ripping it off, and Gnome and KDE running in wildly divergent directions "just because they can" I have had about all I can take. I don't want some radically different Gnome Shell. I fucking HATE KDE's Plasma (what ever happened to having stuff run outside of KDE guys?)
We have reached the point where we're all happy imitating each other, and now we're looking for excuses to be different where no reasons actually exist. We won, guys. We all have desktops on our respective platforms. We're all functional. We have window managers, file managers, a fleet of tools that do the work we need, and most of us are happy.
Well some of us. The desktop devs can't sit still it seems. We've all imitated the Microsoft Experience (TM) to the point where it's all too predictable, and we just can't HAVE that...let's pretend we are innovators! To boldly go and all that...and to hell with the users who just want something familiar.
Well I've had enough. I'm sick of the complexity. I'm sick of the SLOWNESS and the memory bloat. And I'm sick of having to dread the next iteration and the flights of fancy of the free desktop community.
So I'm going back. Back to a simple window manager, and the tools needed to make it laptop-ready. My recipe is simple: X-windows + MWM. Xterm for console. Dolphin or Nautilus as a file manager, when needed. To make it laptop-ready, I need Trayer so I can run nm-applet for my network, and gnome's power manager (sorry KDE, your damn plasmids won't work outside KDE.). And hell, that's about all I need.
Smart. Simple. Clean. And under my control.
To hell with the desktop wars.
But that's the beauty of open source. We have fluxbox, xfce, KDE, ...
IMHO that sums it up, we can all stop posting now. Both KDE and Gmoan have made my setup unusable when upgraded. Always feels like a downgrade to me.
Now Flux: It has a nice menu that I can edit in xterm with my favorite text editor. It does NOT have a bunch of junk cluttering the screen like a desktop to annoy my ancient eyes.
For some reason anything I install just works[tm].
If Canonical put forth the effort, they could drive GNOME wherever they wanted. Red Hat and Suse dominate GNOME because their developers step up and take charge. They become members of the release team, they become maintainers of important modules. They develop, in the open, technologies that become integral to GNOME. There's no one inside of Canonical that has bothered to do that. One ex-Canonical employee admitted that he was forced to stop contributing to upstream GTK+, stop using upstream's source control system, and stop using upstream's bug tracker. Canonical wanted the development done exclusively in Launchpad with bazaar. [1] That lessens Canonical's influence. If they had allowed that developer to continue contributing upstream, they would have 1) gained goodwill 2) improved GTK+ 3) gotten help from all the other GTK+ developers 4) positioned one of their developers in a position to take a leadership role in the GNOME project. Instead, they shut him down and forced him to work in a little walled garden. Canonical never finished the project, and it was eventually completed by other companies and volunteers.
That was a big missed opportunity.
[1] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/03/collaborations-demise.html?showComment=1299807005600#c2417381301530751354
I upgraded iOS on my son's ipod and many of this apps stopped working. This problem is not unique to OSS.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
One point you forgot to obviously include.
- People are too lazy to read whole articles that explain everything and instead base their opinions on someone else's summary.
When I read anything that starts with "The Full Story Behind..." I tend to discount it as just one side's agenda.
The big story is that many in leadership positions are asshats? And these egocentric farts are acting like a bunch of bitchy little girls? And their constant need for self-aggrandizement has held back the development of FOSS in general (and GNOME and KDE in particular)?
Wow.
That's not news.
To summarize Neary's rant for the non-GNOME-KDE-Canonical-oriented:
1. the leadership is not well organized
2. the leadership does not communicate well
3. the leadership does not cooperate well
And Neary's solution?
1. bring all discussion into the open (good)
2. eliminate the riff-raff amateurs (elitist)
3. anoint the leadership through invitation-only (even more so)
4. coerce the asshats into behaving and cooperating with a code of conduct (delusional)
Really? And he expects success with a group consisting in large part of infantile prima donnas?
The current model works well enough with all those personalities involved. It's just messy and inefficient and unprofitable and not likely to lead to world domination. But it's a world where anybody can make a copy of the football and take it home with them and Neary's plan doesn't accommodate that. It attempts to offer the imprimatur of what a corporate world needs, to marginalize the 'amateurs' and consolidate power in a select few all at the expense of the chaos that makes FOSS a living thing.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
(it drives me crazy when I see someone with a 21 inch monitor who maximizes every single window and uses the task bar to switch between them. Totally defeats the point of a large monitor).
Every time I've tired to work differently I've found that positioning windows is more work than it's worth. With efficient keyboard/mouse cooperation I can cut and paste between apps with practically zero lag and I don't typically run any monitoring apps that I'd need to keep a permanent eye on. The upside is that all the menus/buttons/panels are in exactly the same place each time. Sometimes I have some docs or specs I'd like to look at and throw that up on my other monitor, but that's more a replacement for looking at a printout.
Complex applications tend to have rather complex interfaces of their own, I have apps with a "main" area in the center with toolbars on top, two levels of menus on the left, toolboxes on the right and status/output windows on the bottom. It's not just one double-ultra wide block of text, it's actually very nice to have a 24" monitor to fit it all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
and if that guy is characteristic for the gnome community, then i understand why people have problems with that community.
And that's exactly what is being done. You can change most things inside dconf/gconf. But designing the default GUI should be geared towards don't care which is about 90%. The default should be able to take care of 90% of what you're going to do with your desktop. Some of you people just like the comfort of being able to tweak everything. It is a hold over from the days of fvwm and twm where you had all these options. Most normal people don't interact with their user environment so intimately. They use it for tasks. The idea is to appeal to the other 75% of the planet who aren't geeks otherwise we cant' grow. So we need to change the game. sri
...you never hear GNOME's side of the situation, making a lot of disrespectful comments about GNOME (or the others involved) rather baseless and illogical
Some negative comments about Gnome are not at all baseless, for example the one I am about to make. Gnome is based on an outmoded hack of an attempt to build an OOP based GUI without the benefit of an object-oriented compiler. Instead is uses a collection of nasty hacks and conventions, which which I am deeply familiar because I once was deluded enough to think also that C is just as capable of writing object object oriented code as C++. It isn't. What you end up with is an unholy unmaintainable mess. Full of messy casts, and full of bugs, as Gnome has always been. And unable to express reasonable defaults for things in any powerful or consistent way, the result being that Gnome tends to have lousy defaults for just about everything. Add in a liberal does of hubris from certain Gnome maintainers, and have blinkers on regarding the limitations of the GUI toolkit, and you have a recipe for the nasty mess that Gnome has been from the get-go, and will be until somebody finally does something about it. Thankyou Mark.
Incidentally, these comments apply equally to glib, dbus and various other crappy decorations the Gnome guys have forced on the Linux desktop over the years. At least Bonobo is gone, that goodness for small mercies.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I see tribalism is alive and well even in the open source community. Go tribalism! Where would reality TV and genocide be without it?
You can put the minimize and maximize buttons back if you want. Also if you right click on the title bar you will also be able to get minimize. Finally, as for using workspaces, what makes you think you will be forced to use it?
They can have it when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Heck, I have been porting my shortcut keys forward since the days of Windows 3.1 By the time 1998 came around I had been using the same set of hotkeys for 6 years.
vi +
Will doing that uninstall Kubuntu?
testing out my trending skills
And I just keep using the same old ~/.fvwm2rc file, year after year after year.
It ain't supposed to be a fashion statement, people. geez.
i already use xubuntu on my main laptop and my netbook with automotive diagnostics harware
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
No, you select which desktop environment you wish to use (It's a drop-down list from memory) before you log in
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
Not trolling; Conical has the resources and community though ubuntu to do it. The open source community - as far as I have seen - has always said that gnome has a heavy case of NIH. Problem with that is it leads to the idea - correct or not - that everybody in the gnome leadership are heavy handed snobs, even if that's not necessarily the case (I'm not calling them that, just noting the perspective I have seen most voiced) and I personally have never met anybody who actually LIKED the gnome-way of doing things (even people in the gnome community), only parts of the end result. Seems to me, the end result could be much better if somebody forked gnome and made them compete with themselves and not "kde verses gnome" a little.
- d
and I suppose the telecommuting done with most open source projects doesn't work either?
I think the point others are trying to make is that working face to face in a common environment works better. Telecommuting in an open source project may be less optimal but it may also be the only option.
You can put the minimize and maximize buttons back if you want
Alas, there is no window list or panel and as such minimizing windows will feel completely out of place.
Finally, as for using workspaces, what makes you think you will be forced to use it?
I haven't tried GNOME3 myself, but from all the videos and articles on it it does indeed seem like there is no sane way of using it without using workspaces. I need to make up a final opinion once I get to try GNOME3.
Am I the only one finding myself increasingly detached from caring about the desktop shell anyhow? It's like, can we just replace the whole desktop shell with a browser and be done with it (even if all the apps are still served from localhost)?
Does emacs have an integrated web browser yet? :-)
At first glance, this might seem like an ego infested, alpha male, big mustache, beer belly convention; that the lack of central leadership and process makes doing anything useful impossible.
And yet, here I sit, using my GNOME desktop with all of its eye candy, stability, usability and a fair degree of uniformity. (Yeah, I know, there will be a flood of people who will disagree with my own description of GNOME and I don't care.) GNOME is sometimes difficult to figure out when I try to get under the hood though, so it's not all perfect either.
This is just about all of F/OSS at any scale larger than a handful of developers involved. I might go as far as saying that this is not a problem! It is a fact of how the ecosystem works on larger scales. If, in contrast, you would like to compare this with a large company's operations, you will see the same things! You will see all of this in spite of "strong leadership and clearly defined procedure."
If you want to believe that all of these projects are tearing themselves up into tiny pieces with their little ego wars, you will have to ignore the results these monkeys have delivered so far. For some, it is pretty easy to do. Looking at the comments above, you would not think that GNOME is on par even with Windows 1.0.
There is the context of human reality that needs to be considered. This is EVERYWHERE and in every aspect of life. You will find this in charities, churches, weddings, family Christmas, amusement parks, ski resorts and just about any fun or "positive" place/event you can imagine. It's all a part of the human condition and everyone who doesn't understand it seems to resent and reject it as if it weren't a part of their own DNA.
This is how it works. It might seem ugly and chaotic or ridiculous, but it's how we all work pretty much everywhere. If one thing defines human animals, it would be that we can't advance without an enemy.
I was running xubuntu on on old laptop for quite a while. But XFCE has gone the same path as all the other desktops, and it is now too bloated to run on old hardware. Especially compositing is quite a strain on a old graphics card.
KDE 3 was fine, so I could still use trinity, but I ended up with LXDE. It does look like Windows 95, but it is light, fast, and not in the way. Perfect for running 4 lxterminals :-)
AFAIK fd.o only exists as a forum for co-operation between KDE and GNOME. So it's no good for GNOME developers to whine 'fd.o is broken' since it's just as much their responsibility as it is KDE's. No one wants to go back to the mind-numblingly fucked-up design decisions evident in Linux desktops ~10 years ago where, for example, you had a separate application menu for each desktop.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
KDE is not Gnome so you are encouraged to modify any part to your own liking.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
What about someone who doesn't want to?
Configuration options are fine if the defaults are sane. The problem that KDE and GNOME both have is that the defaults often aren't sane.
I don't want to have to turn the minimize button back on, or get rid of the awful spatial interface, or download an add-on to get rid of the damn cashew, or change a setting to turn the desktop back into a simple icon screen, or make the clock not huge, or select sane font sizes.
KDE gives you options for everything and then chooses insane defaults. GNOME hides the options in gconf and then chooses insane defaults.
Why can't this shit work out of the box?
And, by the way, Microsoft isn't immune from this either. They've had some real fuck-ups like the search dog in XP and hiding file extensions by default.
Parent's ADW homescreen link is a goatse, don't click on it.
Dear Windows user,
If all of the above is hopelessly confusing, please try to imagine this reality. When you buy your next Dell, you can choose a UI layout for MS Windows that goes anywhere from DOS to Windows 7 to Bob. While underneath it is the latest OS. Now, you might PICK your UI layout but not all programs you wish to run support it. So you might suddenly get a Windows 3.1 window mixed with your Aero display. Google says fuck you and does its own thing whatever you picked for its browser.
Now while there are a LOT of choices, two stand out. Gnome which looks a bit like OSX but not a lot and KDE which looks like Fisher Price did a Windows 95 skin. Both can... or could be heavily modified. That is, KDE becomes ever more modible. Gnome becomes less so.
If you have a strong stomach http://ultimateedition.info/Ultimate_Edition_2.8/8.png this blueness is a version of Ubuntu. It is actually a good attempt but the default skin is .... well... you know.
The silly bit is that what people often like to mod is the login screen. GDM was moddible and then it was removed. LESS functionality as a feature. That is Gnome.
The problem is that both Gnome and KDE are suffering from "what to do next". As a desktop both achieved their goal long ago, so they wanted more and more. Is it the task of a desktop package to supply a video player? Especially video player with far less capabilities then easily available packages installed along side but not made the default? Ubuntu is NOT Microsoft after all. MS just can't go including closed sources payed for products for other companies in its offerings less the true cost of running MS and closed source becomes readily apparent (you did pay for Winzip didn't you Windows user)
Ubuntu CAN and does included countless 3rd party apps. It doesn't have to bother with its own meager zip only archive utility, it can use any of the superior opensource apps out there (Windows user, have you not replaced MS internal Zip support with anything more capable).
KDE especially seems to want to create a complete set of utilities... and fails... it is not that these utils are bad by itself, its notepad is far superior to MS Notepad but still hopelessly inferior to other offerings. MS can't offer those others, Ubuntu and other Disro's can. That is why it seems pointless for KDE to spend its efforts on countless apps that will be replaced instantly while its core desktop is lacking behind. Its network manager is not as smooth as that of Gnome. Its multipe windows settings is neither. Yes, they are in theory more configurable (you can set different wallpapers for each screen, you can select which soundcard should be preffered).
But all of it shows that neither Gnome or KDE are focussed enough anymore on what the end user wants. Gnome in its drive to be simple keeps removing the capability to tune Gnome to your liking. KDE remains horribly unfocussed and keeps giving me a messy early Windows experience. BOTH can be tuned to something smoother but geez gods, not everyone wants to.
Other desktop/windows managers? Enlightenment stuck still in some alpha state. The others focusing on low resource usage when you can't even buy a single core netbook anymore. Fully tricked out Ubuntu barely makes my computer tick over, any lower consumption of resources and my computer will shutdown.
That is the state of Linux. Is it bad? No, I still use it daily as my main and preffered desktop but only after heavy tuning. Tuning I have done for years now. I don't mind that much but having to fight Gnome everytime because they removed yet another feature seems such a waste and I just never liked KDE.
Do I really have to do what Vista buyers did at some point and install an older OS to keep working?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You must be using Ubuntu, cuz Gnome on my Arch desktop is damn fast (on Ubuntu it was getting slow as hell though)
I think you've hit the nail on the head, there, although I'm not sure that its all about the browser. In fact, I think the desktop only ever truly lived on Mac and a few minority systems (Acorn RISC-OS is a good example in which the desktop became really central).
In the early days, a major (unsung) influence of the desktops on Mac and other systems was that it standardised the user interface. Before then, everytbody (Wordstar, Word Perfect, Lotus etc.) invented their own UI paradigm and even tried to prevent others copying it via look-and-feel lawsuits. With the early desktops, however, there was suddenly a single way to open, save, copy files, select blocks, copy, paste etc. and a fairly consistent menu layout across all applications (at least, per-platform - Apple were litigious towards competing desktops).
That didn't last long: pretty soon all the major software houses were trying to distinguish themselves with thier own systems of floating, dockable palettes, wizzards and unique icon designs, and started suing each other over look and feel again. In my experience, typical Windows users never really embraced the desktop (thanks partly to Windows' MDI mode) and just maximised their current application - often the only file manipulation technique they know is "Save as...". Unix/Linux suffered from the usual "Standard? Yeah we have lots of standards!" phenomenon, plus your typical *nix hacker regards a desktop as a mechanism for running 6 instances of vi and 3 xterms on the same screen.
Add to that, the tendency towards monolithic suites of programs with their own workflow management and, often, plug-in/add-on environments (MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite being the prime examples) many users who use their computer for specific jobs don't really need the desktop.
The browser/webapp is one influence - with no standard UI paradigm (or a choice of 3-4 if you used Java) everybody rolled their own. Now "Apps" and iOS/Android have brought the idea of the monolithic app, often with its own UI paradigm (although Android/iOS do provide standard widgets) well and truly to the fore.
Its a pity, really - without the Desktop/GUI as a standarsing mechanism, and application writers more worried about making their product visually distinctive than easy-to-use (and often confusing those things) computers can only get harder to use.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
And I just keep using the same old ~/.fvwm2rc file, year after year after year.
Really? I'm pretty sure I've had to update mine at least once in the last decade. :)
Yes. In particular, it means there are a bunch of prima donna types among open source developers and advocates. Usually this is a good thing, but you will sometimes get these kinds of spats because both sides are convinced they're right and neither side is particularly good at communicating with people who (they think) are wrong about such important matters.
Cool. Thanks.
testing out my trending skills
If you really have trouble configuring gnome or kde then slashdot probably isn't your cup of tea and this discussion is over your head. Buh-bye now, and thanks for stopping by! HTH, HAND, etc.
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DUH!
Caveat Utilitor
KDE 3 was fine, so I could still use trinity, but I ended up with LXDE. It does look like Windows 95, but it is light, fast, and not in the way. Perfect for running 4 lxterminals :-)
KDE 4 is now fine as well. I run it on some pretty low spec machines (atom and worse). KDE blows the living heck out of Xfce in terms of usability, features, customization, integration and prettiness. Pretty much the same story vs Gnome to a somewhat lesser extent. I have worked with internals of both Xfce and Gnome, and they are both pretty disgusting ad hoc piles of spagetti. KDE's internal structure, based on QT and slots as it is, is relatively more approachable and capable of implementing complex component interaction with a hope of not leaking resources or getting its internal wires crossed.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
There are some live cd's from www.gnome3.org. See how it works for you. Have an open mind. I switched from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 and after about a week I could not go back to GNOME 2 anymore.. Also you don't need to switch until you're ready. The GNOME 2 environment is still going to be there, and GNOME 3 is going to continue to evolve adding features. What is taken away can be done a different way. As for the minimize and maximize issue.. it is a bit of an experiment. Yes, you're right that there is no window list. But you'll see your window in the overview mode. There are some things problematic specifically privacy, but otherwise in this method is better than window list. You have absolutely no distraction on that main window. You can be completely focused on the task you're working on. To understand the design decisions regarding minimize and maximize here is a blog post by Allan Day. The problem with slashdot and other venues is that they talk about lack of innovation in FOSS, but when projects strike out in a different direction they suddenly want conformity to either an apple or windows methodology. They have irrational fear that the power user will be shunted off. In many ways, nobody wants the linux desktop to succeed merely because it will no longer be in a domain of technocrats. In any case, if you want to follow the old model there are plenty of other choices I agree. But keep in mind, there is a convergence that GNOME is taking advantage of. The way I interact with my phone is very similar to GNOME 3. How many more regular users will find themselves feeling quite comfortable in the GNOME 3 because of that familiarity? sri
1. sudo cp -t /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/ /usr/share/applications/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop /usr/share/applications/gconf-editor.desktop /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gconf-editor.desktop
2. Logout
3. Customize GDM as wanted
4. Login
5. sudo rm
6. ???
7. Profit!
I hope that helps :)! You could also use gdm2setup, a program that can configure the new GDM.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Indeed. I have myself tried KDE every now and then, all the way from KDE 3.x, and I still don't quite like it. It feels like they are simply trying to include way too much stuff and every imaginable configuration option.
So what? What exactly is the problem with this? If you like the defaults, and don't want to change millions of configuration options, there's no one forcing you to go through them all and select your favorite one. Just don't go to the configuration menus, and leave everything at the defaults. How hard is that?
Do you feel that, for some reason, if configuration options are present, that you absolutely MUST go through them all?
Normal people just leave them alone, unless there's something that irks them enough to go figure out how to change it.
The job of a good distro is to determine what the best default settings are so that users won't feel compelled to mess with the config options and will be happy with it out-of-the-box.
You might want to try out one of the new distros with KDE 4.6 when it finally comes out. I'm using 4.5, and it's fixed most of the stuff they screwed up in the giant 4.0-series transition, and from what I hear, 4.6 is even better and should make most people happy. Sucks that it took all this time to get stuff back to a decent state, but hopefully they've learned their lesson and won't do something like this again.
Do you feel that, for some reason, if configuration options are present, that you absolutely MUST go through them all?
I don't like clutter, simple as that. The few apps I've tried present you with a dozen toolbars, a menubar with gazillion menu entries, 3 tabs and atleast 3 different content boxes, so it is distracting.
I could also mention how I just installed KDE4 again two days ago just to give it another try, but as soon as I logged in and tried to move the panel to top of the screen the whole thing crashed on me.. I simply left it at that :/
They force on you to suspend your system on lid close,
They decide that you don't need toolbar applets, like cpu monitor.
OK, I was aware of the buttons thing, but I was not aware of these two things. Can you provide a source for this information? Thanks.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
This is in fact, one of the areas where Miguel screwed up. There were already several very fast CORBA implementations available. Rather than using theirs, it was NIH and a much, much slower implementation was created. This had the effect of CORBA's role being dramatically reduced because so many believed CORBA was woefully too slow for any practical use. The truth is, they frequently inappropriately used CORBA (bad architecture) and wrongly blamed CORBA when in fact, it was their NIH-implementation of CORBA which was slow rather than CORBA itself.