Proposal For Gnome To Become Linux-Only

Moderator writes "Could Gnome drop support for non-Linux operating systems? That was a recent proposal on the Gnome mailing list, although there were significant objections in response. Quoting: 'It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels...the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.'"

Comments

Re:Dumb Idea

[BitZtream]

Its completely justified to blame the plumber if the electricity went out because he cut the wire.

You're right. Its not Gnome's FAULT that the nvidia driver is buggy and crashes the machine.

But ...

When the guy tries to do something with certain aspects of the Gnome environment he wants to do, it crashes, so its effectively not useful to him. The ultimate reason is not important in the grand scheme of things to the user, only the developer. The user doesn't give a fuck why it works or doesn't, just that it does or doesn't. Beyond that, its the developers image and problem. Nvidias fault, clearly, but because its triggered by Gnome, he doesn't use Gnome. Either way, Gnome loses support because of its actions, even though its not directly Gnomes fault.

You see this sort of thing all the time with tech people.

Techies like to wax on about what specific technological reason something broke. We'll argue about the actual cause on our bug trackers and forums. Come up with a bunch of alternate ways to solve the problem. Spend 6 months blaming it on a hardware vendor. And ultimately ... a year later the bug is written off because of lack of interest from the original submitters ... BECAUSE THEY'VE GOTTEN SO TIRED OF WATCHING TECHIES CIRCLE JERK themselves on forums and bug trackers that they just moved on to something else ... which may not be free ... or it may not be under some ideal license ... but it fucking doesn't piss them off regularly.

OSS continually fails to get that. Plenty of companies miss it as well, but they tend to go out of business. OSS projects just continue to push on due to the sheer number of geeks who 'believe' in the project.

If every time I call a certain plumber, my electricity goes out ... I'm not going to call that plumber anymore, I'm going to find another plumber who can manage the problem without breaking shit, even if it means I have to give up the fact that the plumber I'm dumping was a hot chick, I'd rather not miss the fucking super bowl.