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Interview With GNOME 3 Designer Jon McCann
An anonymous reader writes "In an extensive interview, GNOME 3 designer Jon McCann talks about the future of GNOME 3 — why it's all about the apps and why he is convinced that KDE and Ubuntu are actually different operating systems. He also reacts to the outspoken criticism against GNOME 3, which has been making the rounds lately."
he is convinced that KDE and Ubuntu are actually different operating systems
Um... last I heard KDE is not an operating system.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"There's always things when you look back that you wish you would have had a little more time to finish or polish."
Why does an open-source project have a deadline?? The point of open-source is that _you_ as a developer decide when it is ready, not customers/shareholders/marketing dictating your release schedule.
I work on a open source project. If a feature takes a year to do, we take the time to do it right, rather then hack something up that "works now", but needs to be re-written later.
What am I missing??
I am addicted to focus follows mouse and silly OSX can't handle that because of its insane menu (you would loose focus of the windows whose menu you are trying to reach, Unity has the same problem).
The real problem is that Gnome2 worked, yes it took a long time, yes it was not perfect either when it started but recently it became simply usable.
And suddenly almost every distro out there throws it all away for a new window manager that is not just incomplete but even downright buggy. What else do you call it when you have to kill processes for browsing windows/samba shares? Is that such a complex hardcore hacker task?
KDE ain't much better, open a file from the network and it will often try to copy it locally first before it can play. Very useful for large movie files I can tell you.
The alternatives? Not much better either. xfce seems determined to use 100% cpu power for showing its native cpu widget.... why bother writing code at all, just put a red picture on the taskbar and call it a day. Same result.
Gnome 3 should have been a side project and an optional desktop. Wanna play with it? Go ahead but if you don't, you don't see it. Ubuntu sorta allows this if you don't upgrade to the next big release but many small distro's just throw it in an update. And there you are, suddenly nothing works anymore and when you reboot you go "Oh shit".
It just ain't ready yet. It crashes randomly, misses functionality, forgets to suspend when a laptop is closed (which finally started to work perfectly and now they broken it again). This is a beta, no an alpha release. Why is everyone using it as their main desktop. Ubuntu and Fedora/Red hat. WHY? They didn't start to use Enlightenment a mere decade after its first alpha release? Why use Gnome 3 straight away?
I think there is a desperate wish for the year of the linux desktop. Fuck it, ain't gonna happen. Never. Why not? Because of this kinda crap. I have converted people to Ubuntu, it is easy, it works, it plays farmville and has no malware. Buttons the wrong side? Noobs don't care they literally just shrug their shoulders and click the other side of the window.
But the Ubuntu 11.01 upgrade? I converted them all back to a pirated windows system. I installed Ubuntu for them because I was fed up constantly supporting them, now I was going to explain to them Unity/Gnome3 instead with more bugginess and unwanted changes then Vista? Is there some opensource developers penis envy? MS can produce a desktop nobody wants, we want it too?
This weekend I will be installing an old ubuntu on my desktop (this is written from a windows game machine) having tried various releases. I have come to a conclusion. I am old. I did gentoo, I did linux from scratch, I made skins, I tweaked, I compiled. Now I just want a fucking simple desktop that just fucking stays the fucking same for longer then two seconds. I REALLY do not give a fuck WHERE the close buttons is but I expect my fucking laptop to fucking suspend when I fucking close it and NOT for this YEARS old GODDAMN issue to come back because some fuck face wants to do a touch desktop and then forgets to include touch because he has some jerkwad fantasy about Linux on some device.
Upset? YES.
Nerd rage? Abso-fucking-lutely.
The proof that Gnome 3 sucks? They had to kill off gnome 2. If they are so convinced 3 was going to be the hottest thing ever, then they could just have let gnome 2 running in low maintenance mode and given the people a choice. You only have to pull a new coke if you know people don't WANT your new crap so you are not giving them an option and hope the rage dies out before you do. Well, I am nerd, hear me roar!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I still find it utterly unreasonable to just scrap the Gnome 2 desktop. It was the most stable, "just works" DE for *nix, and they just threw all that work out for eye candy. I tried to like Gnome 3 but it feels more like a toy than KDE4 did when it came out. It makes me wonder how many thousands of development hours were just flushed down the toilet for this. I could understand it if they used Gnome2 as the foundation, and added to it, but they didn't.
"Unfortunately on the internet - and in free software in particular - we have a lot of people whose voices aren't heard very loudly, and we have to take their needs into accounts as well as those who are vocal."
Go ahead and call them the "Silent Majority". You know you want to.
What really surprised me, though, was how he just came out and said you don't want to make it too easy to figure out how to change things, and that letting the user customize things is undesirable..."And I think there is a lot of value to have that experience you show the world to be consistent. In GNOME2 we didn't do that particularly well because everyone's desktop was different." I think that GNOME3 really carries through the premise of gnome-screensaver, another result of Mr. McCann's work--in it, the user is the enemy, and can't be trusted not to do something evil if you let him configure things, (Kind of like the justification for DRM, come to think of it.)
The whole point of any software is to make something efficient and useful. Gnome 3 is anything but efficient. I used it for several weeks. I do not mind making minor changes to make something better suit my needs but the changes the Gnome team made were ridiculous. Rather than fork it, I did what most users do when a FOSS project makes changes they find unacceptable. I uninstalled Gnome and installed something else.
The whole point of FOSS is that if you do not like something, you can change it to make it more efficient and useful for you. Stop crying about changes/decisions the original development group is making, fork the project and write you own.
Except that this guy, in the interview, even tries to discourage people from customizing their desktop environment:
So this person, who's apparently pretty important in the FOSS world, is against what you say is the whole point of FOSS. That indicates a problem to me.
> UNIX was built on the idea that the filesystem is the centre of the operating system.
> Clearly, they have forgotten that.
Nope. They (along with folk like Poettering) are members of the UNIX Haters Club. They know UNIX, they just hate it with every fiber of their being. They want to replace the UNIX Way, they disagree over exactly what the brave new future looks like but they know what they don't like.
We allowed unassimilated immigrants commit access to our cultural heritage. There is a lesson in this in/for the meatspace immigration debates.
Democrat delenda est
And it can be done, of course - as you said, they're just toolkits on top of X11 on top of Linux.
If only they were. But KDE and GNOME aren't just X11 toolkits and widget sets, they're not even just tightly integrated sets of window managers and file explorers and MIME type registries and sound servers and search engines and mail/calendar databases and instant messagers and event notification systems, they're also two fundamentally different component/object models, and sets of IPC daemons - KParts, Bonobo, D-BUS, Pl and friends. They have two different low-level implementation languages and object systems - C++ with the KDE signal/slot preprocessor macros vs C and GObject - and so on. They implement their own entire virtual filesystems in userspace code.
Sure, there's whole chunks of Linux which remain agnostic about what desktop framework is running on top of them, including X11. But a raw Linux and X11 isn't actually that useful to a modern user, unless all you want to do is edit text files in EMACS and browse the Web with Lynx. Generally, you want some kind of runtime support for mounting USB devices when you plug them in, navigating compound documents and ZIP archives as if they were folders, and registering and instantiating component frameworks from dynamically loadable libraries. And most of that stuff is all done at the "desktop framework" level.
One could argue that this kind of file-and-process management functions should be the job of an OS, but it's too late - the Microsoft/Apple approach of "shove it all together into the graphical desktop shell" has won, the open-source DEs have copied the big boys, and now there's a war.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I absolutely agree. I was a big fan of Ubuntu until 10.10. 10.10 was amazing. Packages worked, Gnome worked, the proprietary Nvidia drivers worked and I could concentrate on installing pgAdmin, Java and other dev tools and just frigging work.
Then along came 11.04 which I tried first on a Netbook, and was wondering what the hell was happening. This was some braindead fuckface who had Mac OSX nerd envy. I'm a Mac system administrator, I own two Macs and if I want a Mac I'll use a Mac, not a fucking half-assed braindead clone by some idiot far removed from the mainstream Linux users (Yes, Shuttleworth, that's you). And peripherally I heard about Gnome 3. When I saw the first releases of Gnome 3 and that idiot presenting it, I burst out laughing. I actually did.
Who, in the name of all that's fucking holy, do these shitheads think are going to use their systems? Mac users? I find it hysterical that McCann even thinks that any casual computer using Mac user would even think of using Linux. Netbooks? Somebody ought to inform Shuttleworth and McCann that Netbooks are dead as a concept, killed by Apple's iPad, which bring us to Tablets and Smartphones. Do they honesty think that any major manufacturer is going to use any of these craptastic distros where Android fits the bill perfectly, is as open as they need it to be and satisfies almost all who use it (so much so, that Microsoft and Apple are fighting a huge legal war against it in terror).?
McCann babbles on about the cloud, because someone showed him an iPad and he came. Google has this down pat with ChromeOS. Native C/C++ code is coming to Chrome and will make ChromeOS the perfect cloud OS for anyone who wants that. I am willing to bet good money that ChromeOS with native code will have more apps written for it in its first month of existence than Gnome 3 will have had since it was released.
Who is going to write apps for Gnome3, or Ubuntu 11.10? Is someone going to port Blender, Inkscape and Gimp to either fit into Unity or Gnome 3's UI concepts? I seriously doubt that.
Don't they realise that the people who use Linux use it because of its flexibility? Here's a big hint for them: The Windows95 Windowing concept lived so long because it works. Microsoft will discover this when Windows 8 rolls round with its fucktastic HTML5 tiled interface and MS's user start complaining that although Windows Explorer was shit, at least they could find their fucking files.
Fuck them. I wish them good luck in their journey towards obscurity. Me, I'm on Mint with XFCE. Mint is switching its XFCE distro back to Debian and I'm very, very glad about that.