Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce

kai_hiwatari writes "In Google+, Torvalds criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess' and said that the user experience is unacceptable, adding that because of GNOME 3, he has ditched GNOME for Xfce. He said that Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 — but a huge step up from GNOME 3."

Comments

Change for the sake of change?

[damn_registrars]

I think both the GNOME group, and Torvalds as well, are guilty of change for the sake of change. Sure, he calls GNOME 3 an "unholy mess", but if

Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 â" but a huge step up from GNOME 3.

Then why didn't he just stay with GNOME 2?

Of course as a KDE user myself I want to ask why he didn't switch to KDE instead, but I know better than to open that can of worms. It is almost like asking an emacs user why they don't just switch to vi...

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[ddxexex]

He actually was a KDE user before hand and switched to GNOME 2 when KDE4 came out. The question is what will he switched to after Xfce gets a big upgrade?

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[calmofthestorm]

Unfortunately that's not always an option. Code tends to rot in a number of ways -- old bugs go unpatched, it no longer plays nice with system libraries. Particularly with an octopus like GNOME that interferes with every part of the system, you can start to see package conflicts, dependencies on old system libraries, etc. This is slow, gradual, and can often be worked around item by item, especially for a hacker like Torvalds, but it takes time and energy.

I had this experience myself with Amarok. I really loved the old amarok (1.4), when it had all the features of the full-on bloated clients like iTunes yet was still light and fast like Rhythmbox. Also fully customizable and scriptable with dcop. I kept pulling it in from backports, and eventually even compiling it myself, when Amarok 2 started coming standard (hoping that the developers would realize the mistake they'd made in throwing away such a perfect interface for that crap). Eventually, I gave up, as it failed to compile due to newer libs one time too many.

Thankfully, some kind folks forked 1.4 and made clementine, but it still lacks many of the features Amarok had at its height (automated album art and lyrics fetching being some of my favorites).

All change is relative. When you stand still, the world moves around you.

The beauty of the desktop vs the cloud is you at least have some control over when you migrate to the new interface.

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[MacTO]

To answer your unasked question, he did use KDE a few years back (and I think that he had some rather harsh words for GNOME at the the time). Thing is, he left KDE when it had its radical overhaul.

I think the problem is that GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us: environments that are more suitable to entertainment than actual work. It also strikes me that Torvalds is the type of guy who works pretty hard, so neither environment is suitable for him anymore.

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[lejerdemayn]

pretty obvious: he will write his own Desktop Environment. after the linux kernel and git, 'lo and behold: the BASTARD!

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[macemoneta]

LXDE.

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[DMalic]

no, OSX is a plugin for iTunes

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[mrchaotica]

Them - "So what, do you think you are smarter than me or something?"

You (correct answer) - "It's not that I think I'm smarter than you; it's that I spend my life learning this shit and you have better things to do."

Re:Change for the sake of change?

[Haeleth]

I think the problem is that GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us

Not the rest of "us". That's the problem: GNOME (and, to a lesser extent, KDE) have decided, for some reason, to become desktop environments primarily targeted at the sort of person who isn't even remotely interested in using GNOME or KDE.

It's like the Pope turned round one day and said "okay, we're going to rewrite our doctrines to make them more appealing to atheists!"

They're all apeing OSX

[TerranFury]

Earlier GNOMES and KDEs imitated Windows. One thing Windows did right was the Taskbar. It is, in all seriousness, an extremely good metaphor. It separates the acts of launching programs from managing which ones are running, because, dammit, those are different things.

OSX, with its Dock, conflates launching a program with looking at a window that it has opened. The implicit metaphor is that all programs are always "running," and that the messy details of actually starting a process should be wrapped up by the operating system so that we don't need to think about it. Then, multitasking within a program falls to the program itself. Everybody ends up implementing their own tabs.

Android does the same thing as OSX. All "apps" are always "running," more-or-less, from a GUI point of view. Under-the-hood, they obviously are not; they have to restore themselves from saved state. But this varies from program to program, and is one of the reasons Android has an inconsistent user experience. Given an unfamiliar program, you don't know at first when you're quitting it, and when you're leaving it running in the background.

Now, Gnome3 appears also to falling into the OSX camp.

What Torvalds seems to prefer, in KDE3.5, Gnome2, and now XFCE, is a more Windows-like metaphor for multitasking. I'm with him. I think that's one thing Windows did right.

Personally, I think KDE 3.5 was the height of full-featured Linux desktop environments, and it's degraded into so much juvenile bullshit ever since. Now, just give me something lightweight that uses a reasonable multitasking paradigm and gets out of the way. XFCE fits the bill.

Re:They're all apeing OSX

[Baloroth]

They fall into the trap that all GUI makers do. Once the GUI works, and works well, it only needs to be maintained, not changed. But, since they want to feel like they're doing something, they actually change it. The result is a different feel, which whether it technically works better or not alienates users. Witness Firefox. Now, it is possible to make changes that result in improvements, or at least maintaining the same level of usefulness. But those are rare. The GUI system has been in major use for 20 years or so, and it more or less reached maturity 15 years ago.

There is a reason the GUI for XP is nearly the same as that for Win95. It looks a bit different, but someone could go from one to the other almost instantly. (Compare that to OS X, which I've only used a couple of times but managed to confuse the hell out of me. Worse, every similar implementation has its own rules that make shifting from one to the other nearly impossible without relearning the whole system.) Refinements have been made to the point where no further changes were needed. GUI designers still wanted to find something better, not realizing that for the way we use computers, it doesn't really exist. And then we got KDE 4, GNOME 3, and to a lesser extent Win 7 and Vista (MS prudently, for once, made pretty minor changes that were easy to revert. And actually work pretty well, because they didn't abandon the old system entirely). Minor change is the key. The Desktop isn't going to undergo any paradigm shifts anytime soon, and that is a good thing. It works, it works well, and new interfaces are just solutions looking for problems.

He's not the only one

[MetricT]

I've worked as a sysadmin in academic HPC for 10+ years. 1000+ Linux servers. I've worked with Gnome for years, since the 1.x days.

Gnome 3 is so bad I've switched to using Windows 7. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot were the Gnome3 developers "thinking"?

Want to refactor a crap ton of code? I understand completely. Want to completely trash the most usable Linux UI? Go die in a fire. Seriously.

Start listening to your user base, or you'll quickly cease to have one.

Re:He's not the only one

[blai]

The problem here might have been that they actually *are* listening to the user base, but the user base doesn't know that it wants. "I want it easier to use", oh "let's make something something more prominent" and here's what you get.

Instead of just listening, I think developers need some sort of intelligence of their own, too.

Re:He's not the only one

[datakid23]

While I mostly agree - why hasn't anyone just forked Gnome2 and run with it - it is under the GPL isn't it?

Re:I don't get it

[geek]

Because he is a brilliant and positive influence in the community who is outspoken and contributes in a major way. Because if it weren't for him there wouldn't be a gnome or kde. The man has created more jobs than Obama with his "free" code. I may not always agree with him but I'll be damned if I don't lend him my ear.

Exactly the same trajectory, but for the ending.

[aussersterne]

I started using Linux full-time in 1994, wrote a number of Linux books, did a whole bunch of server and desktop installations and was a huge fan of Linux+KDE beginning with KDE pre-1.0 releases. I was religiously all-Linux, all-KDE, all the time until KDE 4 on Fedora 9.

I stuck with KDE4 for several months; at first, I couldn't imagine changing the desktop environment I'd had for so long.

Eventually, however, I realized I spent far too much time trying to configure and reconfigure my KDE4 desktop to behave and appear in ways that were acceptable to me. It seemed like I was always spending time configuring my desktop, yet never getting it quite right. I'd be in the middle of a real task and something would annoy the hell out of me and the next thing you know I'd be knee-deep in configuration and kludging and after a couple hours I'd determinedly force myself to give up and live with it (frown, frown) only to find myself configuring once again before the day was out.

After about three months of that, I switched to GNOME 2 on Fedora. It worked well for me and I decided I actually rather liked GNOME. Once again I settled into an environment, developed a workflow and keyboard and mouse habits and figured out how to do all of the little tweaks I wanted to do each time I did a new distro install to support new hardware, etc.

But when GNOME3 details came out and as the KDE4/GNOME3/Unity trifecta started to overtake the Linux world, I got really frustrated. I switched to Xfce for a while, but like Linus, found it not quite where I wanted to be. I tried to return to Windowmaker, which I'd used back in the day before KDE-1pre releases. But all these years later and no native file manager? No drag-and-drop? Yes, I *can* use the command line, but sometimes I'd like to have a working desktop metaphor as well.

So I tried Enlightenment. Nightmare; a toy project. You spend all of your time just trying to get the install consistent.

Then I realized that I felt really good about the Macs I was encountering at the university where I am faculty. So I committed my first Linux-betrayal since 1994, repartitioned, and installed a Hackintosh partition to "test out" OSX.

Three months later I'd built a brand new Hackintosh desktop and bought all Apple software, the first software I'd bought in decades after decades as a free software user. The Linux partition, while still there, was rarely booted any longer. Six months later I'd ditched the Hackintosh desktop and bought a MacBook Pro and reformatted all of my long-term archival media to be Mac-readable.

There are things that frustrate me about Macs (most notably the spinning beach ball moments and the inadequacy of Mac Ports next to the RedHat and Debian repositories, less notably but still there the cost of the hardware and difficulty of cheap repairs with eBay spare parts), but I am in all honesty more productive than I've been in a very, very long time, and once again rarely have to worry about being pissed off by, or spending time I don't have reconfiguring or trying to kludge apart, my desktop—just like back in the KDE3 and GNOME2 days.

Too bad those days are over, but I fear that free software has lost this padawan to the dark side for life. Once you get used to no configuration, no kludges, everything works to your satisfaction 95 percent of the time, it's really hard to imagine going back to tweaks, hacks, editing configuration files, and new releases that routinely require that all of these be rediscovered and that come down the pipe in regular updates and are required for recent hardware support.

Is anyone at Gnome / KDE / Unity sorry?

[J Story]

Is everyone in the Gnome / KDE / Unity groups a Microsoft mole, engaged in sucking out utility from those desktop environments? Is there no one there who realizes how big a mistake they made?

It's one thing for a single group to screw the pooch, but for all three to get the same brain-dead urge to redesign smacks of conspiracy.

Re: Listening to the user base

[Kernel Krumpit]

There's a sig out there by someone in Slashdot land attributed to Henry Ford: If i'd 've asked my customers what they wanted they'd 've said "a faster horse"...

Re:Tiling window manager

[arth1]

Tiling? I'd be very surprised if Linus didn't use overlapping windows. There's no need to limit the number of visible windows to those who can be fully visible - most of them are waiting for your input, or compiling something (in which case you usually only want to see when it stops).

Of course, overlapping windows work better with focus-follows-mouse and no-raise-on-click; that allows you to copy/paste between windows without any of them popping up to the front.

Back on topic, I have ditched Gnome 3 myself, for multiple reasons:
- The amount of mouse movement you have to do is ridiculous. Sometimes all the way to the left, then all the way to the right again, to do something really simple.
- As Linus said, the assumption that you only want to run one of each app is truly braindead.
- Multi-monitor support is even more broken than in Gnome 2. Which makes the first point even more of an issue, when you can't even open a menu on your second monitor, but have to drag the mouse over to the first one.
- You can't run it in a VM - you have to use the fallback mode, which means you have to relate to two different interfaces. (And the fallback mode is way less functional than Gnome 2)
- I don't have Windows keys on my keyboard. The shortcuts assume that you do. Well, Gnome 3 devs, if you really like Windows that much, run it!
- No way to set fonts? Or DPI? I don't want "larger", I want a 10 pt font to be exactly 10 pt (~3.5 mm), so it's the same size on all my monitors and printers.
- The superuser is not allowed access to a user directory? .gvfs goes against everything that is holy.
- Lack of man pages. In a terminal, I don't want to deal with graphics-laden help files. Lack of documentation in general, for that matter.
- For having been so simplified since Gnome 2, it's strange that the memory usage skyrockets. Or perhaps not, given it requires three different interpreted languages (not counting bash, sed and awk), and lists of libraries longer than my arm. (just do ldd on a gnome executable).
- I take back that the Gnome 3 users have Windows envy. It's Mac envy too - disable all but one mouse buttons.
- How can I unmount a USB drive? Or eject a CD? Or... pretty much anything where either a desktop icon or the "places" menu would have come in handy.

But most of all, the excessive mouse waving required makes it completely unusable, especially with more than one monitor (in which case virtual desktops become completely unusable).

It's a steaming pile of technology, and must be aimed at iPad users incapable of doing more than one thing at a time, and who get confused by more than one mouse button or difficult things like "font size" or "minimize".
This is why I stick with Fedora 14 and gentoo, and not F15, nor will I go to F16 unless Red Hat forks and brings back Gnome 2.

Re:Change is too radical in Gnome 3

[Bloodwine77]

Gnome 3 and Unity both have a hard-on for tablets. It is as if the people behind the projects think desktops and laptops will disappear within the next couple years and everybody will either be using tablets or smart phones instead.

GNOME Intelligence Quotient

[soloport]

New study out shows a distinct correlation between desktop preference and IQ.

Preemptive: Looks as though it might have been a hoax.

Re:Tiling window manager

[smash]

Perhaps because linus is not interested in a window manager holy war, and just wants to "get shit done" in a sane and efficient manner. KDE used to allow this. Gnome used to allow this. When KDE4 came out, my workflows were broken to the extent that I couldn't be bothered spending the excessive amount of time required to get them back. I have not yet used Gnome 3, but I suspect Linus is in the same situation. When its easier and less painful to change to a competing desktop environment than it is to use the new version of your previous choice, something is seriously wrong.

Trinity Desktop Environment

[Zombie Ryushu]

Is anyone here aware of the fact that KDE 3.5 still exists under the name Trinity Desktop Environment?