Slashdot Mirror
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too late, and doing it their own way, going further away from what most people want in a desktop, and Unity is already outdated when you compare it to what's happening in the tablet world.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.
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.
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.
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.
You're confused. They don't mean the UI is hard to understand, they mean GNOME as a loose organization of developers and goals.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
Funnily enough, someone realized that, and they've actually made a programming language (syntactically largely a C# derivative) that is based on the GObject object model, but which hides all of the ugliness that is inherently exposed in C. It's pretty neat, as the output you get is still usable directly from C, but your code is high-level and bug-free (at least in parts which have to do with GObject plumbing).
I know. It's so awesome that a (previously proprietary) platform is killing FOSS platforms. It'll be awesome to just burn the last decade worth of effort for a new (and totally controlled by Google, hardware vendors, and telecom carriers) platform incompatible with everything that exists.
Actually, I think Apple has a better idea of what the user wants. People generally take what works well enough, and Android is extremely simplified.
Ah, the ad-hominem. How wonderful.
Instead, they don't communicate with the community except after the AOSP is released to the second class open source community, and there aren't any rewrites because no one else has the authority to push new things, good or bad.
I'd care about Android being on desktops if they put control of the platform into a 3rd party's hands, rather than entirely in the hands of a corporation who could take future versions proprietary at a moment's notice. Oh and if they went back and scrubbed all the garbage like /system and /data that are left over from Android's early closed source days.
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.
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