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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."
Translation: The newest butthurt diva within the FOSS community has scathing words for why users should just unquestioningly bow down to the decisions of the almighty developers rather than *gasp* criticizing their work when it's crap. First Asa, now this turd? Who's next in the FOSS lineup for being a butthurt diva?
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??
...is still mad about Gnome 3.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
"You do see a lot of hackers using Mac OS X these days and I think that's a little bit unfortunate and probably there are many reasons why they do that, but that's not immediately what you might think of as a super hacker-focused OS."
Gee, you think people get tired of constantly tweaking this and that, fixing broken apps/models, relearning a UI, and just want shit to work as they get older, so they can work on other things? Go figure!
That part in the interview where he called the KDE designers a "bunch of punk-ass bitches" was a bit uncalled for, I think.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
The actual quotation from the article is "from an end-user perspective and a third-party-developer perspective GNOME and KDE are different operating systems." The GNOME platform is as different from the KDE platform as it is from, say, the Wine platform. All three are toolkits that run on top of X11/*n?x.
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.
Photos were like the first to be cloud-enabled - if you will, Flickr and Picasa are enormously successful. And Documents are also increasingly cloud-hosted. Music was the latest, that was a sort of a hold-out because of a all sort of legal complications
Why would music be a hold-out? People could publish photos that they took on a web server and possibly distribute them under a license for free cultural works. (Case in point: Picasa and Flickr.) Likewise, people could publish songs that they wrote and performed on a web server and possibly distribute them under a license for free cultural works. (Case in point: the old MP3.com, and later Myspace.) Might the "legal complications" have something to do with a cultural preference for songs that established professionals in the music industry have written over songs that members of the general public have written? That says more about the lack of participatory culture in the industrialized world than about any underlying technical problem.
Early in the interview he says that they need to write apps for "things that every computer needs to be able to do. Like managing photos, music and documents. So we want to write some of those basic utilities, that are more part of the OS than a third-party-application would be."
The only conclusion I can draw from such a statement is that the existing Gnome apps are crap. Why else reinvent the wheel?!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Nah, that's Miguel de Icaza.
"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.)
Problem would go away with a Firefox release schedule. The old 7 year releases just do not add innovation enough. Just ask Asa Dolzter?
If we had a Firefox release schedule where every 6 - 8 weeks we have a complely new UI and to top it off ... a new API so all the scripts and preferences will need to be changed we would truly be 21st century modern. I mean Gnome 3 is sooo last April. Its August come on where is Gnome 7!
http://saveie6.com/
Why do you have to get rid of him? Isn't that part of the point of open source free software, that you can disagree with the project maintainers enough to fork it yourself and take it in your own direction?
So why do you need to get rid of the person you disagree with? There's little stopping someone from coming up with a fork based on Gnome2 and running with it...
Am I the only one who actually likes Gnome 3? I've been using KDE for years, but when I wiped my laptop a few months ago, I decided to give Gnome 3 a shot and I haven't gone back. I'm still using KDE on the desktop, but I will probably try Gnome 3 there too when I have the time.
I would like an quick way to switch between windows within an application though, Alt-Tab switches between applications and each application can be expanded for all the windows, but I would like a shortcut for switching between application windows.
Wait a second ... GNOME 3 has a designer?
The fact that the top thing mentioned as still needing improvement for 3.2 is "touch" reinforces the idea that this whole insanity was aimed at being more touchpad friendly all along. Why all these desktop GUIs feel they should work toward that unproductive metaphor lately boggles my mind; it's like the hipsters have taken over open-source development. When I can get a cheap touchpad 30" monitor to replace the one I use on my desktop, maybe I'll be willing to consider a move in that direction. Seems a long way off.
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.
Too bad forking doesn't happen more often. On the top of my head, IMO KDE 3.5.10, GNOME 2 before they started fucking it up with the last few versions, and Firefox 2.0.0.20/3.6.18 all need forked and (key words here) actually get somewhere. Sure, there's Trinity as a continuation of KDE 3.5.10, but what support does it have? Good luck even finding a distro with it; wake me up when it's in Debian or some other major or growing distro. Firefox is also in severe need of forking... I wish I had the ability to perform such a task, but I don't.
Yeah, open source is great for allowing you to fork if you don't like the way a project is going. But, that's a hell of an undertaking that not just any person can do. Especially when you're talking something as complex as a Web browser or even a complete desktop environment.
Yeah, yeah. Go ahead and spout the useless (but inevitable) open source bragging that "the source code for Trinity is out there. Just download, compile and install it for your distribution!" But just as a reminder, not everyone is a developer/programmer and is capable of, or wants to, compile a whole damn desktop. :)
While I don't care to read anything posted by this man ever again, I can see his perspective and appreciate that he genuinely cares about the project... even if his take on things seems a little silly and sometimes tramples on my idea of what free computing should mean.
I can only believe that he doesn't speak for everybody involved with GNOME 3, and that a good many of my current negative views of GNOME 3 will be put down by 3.2 which will hopefully fuss about my video drivers a bit less (working suspend doesn't mean much if the UI doesn't load). Right now it just occupies space on my session menu and I look forward to the day that I can choose between KDE, XFCE, GNOME, and Openbox when I log in depending on how I feel at the time. There's a bit of promise in GNOME 3 and I would be happy to see it fulfilled, with the caveat that I already have an Android phone and I'm not interested in downgrading to a netbook user experience any time soon.
That said, I wasn't using GNOME 2 when it was scuttled and wasn't around when KDE 4 was brand new so I don't know what it's like to have my favourite environment of many years pulled out from under me.
Off-topic: I understand that everybody and their cousin is all about the "cheap server-side storage" ... err... "cloud" thing now, but the more I see it the more I'm reminded of my 60GB/mo. limit (+$2 per gig after... the lovely world of Canadian ISPs) and horribly slow upload speeds, am I really the only one with a worthless ISP? Is computing really getting that far ahead that everyone using their own hard drives, networks, and removable storage devices needs to be left behind? Is it even going down that path at all? It still feels like some kind of gigantic industry ploy to convince the world there's been some kind of new technological revolution (was geocities a "cloud" service? photobucket? what the hell?) , and it still sickens me to see people that should know better even using the term.
Slashdot comments usually have some input from "both sides". We argue about nuclear power, dark matter, illegal downloading, you name it. Sometimes there is a majority opinion and sometimes it's more divided. I just read all of the top-level comments and all of the subject lines on this and it looks unanimous. There is no debate here, gnome 3 is crap. If slashdot agrees that much, someone fucked up - and bad.
The problem is simple, KDE doesn't realize that most apps can understand samba like paths so it thinks, "Hey, I don't know this app (mplayer) so it might not get this url so I just copy it to temp and give it that". It is a known bug.
Gnome/Ubuntu does it different by mounting samba shares on the fly and simply giving the path to that. It is not perfect either because that mount point is in a hidden dir which not all programs can open in their file open dialog.
Try this. Kubuntu, install smplayer or vlc and open a file on a samba share. Happy copying.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.