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Proposal For Gnome To Become Linux-Only

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the oh-that'll-be-fine dept.

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.'"

10 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. I support this! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I support this because it can only help to make Gnome more irrelevant.

    1. Re:I support this! by rjmx · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Agreed. Even as it becomes less customisable (so as not to frighten the less-experienced, apparently), Gnome gets ever more bloated as time goes by.
      Methinks the Gnome developers have totally lost the plot.

    2. Re:I support this! by clang_jangle · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I was waiting to see if they screw up the 3.0 branch and piss everyone off like kde4 did, but I guess the anticipation was killing them so they had to find a way to start alienating users now, in spite of having no newly-designed crappy interface yet.

      Good time to be a wmaker and openbox user...

      --
      Caveat Utilitor
  2. So what? by airfoobar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's open source. If there are people who want it on other platforms, they can just fork it. Right?

  3. Re:Dumb Idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a dumb idea for software architecture reasons, too. I'll explain.

    When writing a Windows application, you must recognize that the interface between your application and TODAY'S version of Windows must remain fluid such that you can support changes delivered by patch or by OS release. This is known formally as "decoupling" and it is necessary to isolate big systems that need to communicate. Decoupling is important for unix applications as well, because kernels change over time and APIs vary slightly between unixes.

    If you truly believe your application gains anything by eliminating a decoupling library/layer, you have missed the point of the past few DECADES of object-oriented programming.

  4. Time for a Fork by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If I were a non-Linux dev who'd contributed to Gnome, I'd be seriously considering a fork no matter what the outcome of this is. If there's one thing I've learned from working on open-source projects, it's that once the Linux Zealots' radical proposals start gaining real traction it's time to bail.

    1. Re:Time for a Fork by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      These changes are not being proposed by zealot's. These changes are being made through corporate decisions. Almost every single gnome dev in favor of this move works for Redhat. It's an effort will eventually shut out competing companies like Canonical and Oracle unless they either fork the project, or switch to another DE. Oracle has the money to throw developers at it, but they only care about their hardware. Canonical is way too small to do it, barely breaking even in revenues (if even that).

  5. Re:WTF? by FooBarWidget · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The days that desktop environments are only GUIs and only consisted of a bunch of windows that paint stuff on the screen are long over. These days desktop environment handle a lot more lower-level stuff, and users rightfully expect them to do so. Think for example user interfaces for managing hardware, system settings (user accounts, security, firewall, wired and wireless network), etc. GNOME depends on various background daemons that must be started at boot. All of these things have system-dependent mechanisms. Configuring the wireless network is completely different between FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. All 3 of those OSes have a completely different init system, completely different firewall system, etc.

  6. What are these guys smoking? by Beelzebud · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Gnome went from being the most usable, stable, "just works" DE for unix-like systems, to a steaming pile of crap, IMHO. I'm still in shock that they took a stable, functional foundation that was Gnome 2, and just literally threw it all away. I tried to give Gnome 3 a chance, but it's like a damned cell-phone UI.

  7. Re:Can you get Gnome to replace X? by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You are doing it wrong.
    1. If you are an adminstrator of any worth you can do it without X via command line.
    2. Almost all enterprise Applications that are fairly new are Web Based
    3. There are other just as affordable or more affordable remote access "thin client" solutions available.

    X11 is an aged and out of date protocol. It had its use, today it is a dinosaur. Just because you work on badly managed enterprise or aged model, it doesn't mean everyone else does.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.