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Linux Mint Developer Forks Gnome 3
An anonymous reader writes "Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, has forked Gnome 3 and named it Cinnamon. Mint has experimented with extensions to Gnome in the latest release of their operating system, but in order to make the experience they are aiming for really work, they needed an actual fork. The goal of this fork is to use the improved Gnome 3 internals and put a more familiar Gnome 2 interface on it."
How long can he keep it up and what about long-term compatibility with GNOME 3 apps? Eventually I'm sure their "lineage" will drift far enough apart that you're either pulling in multiple families of libraries that do the same thing or you get GNOME 4 apps that don't work on Cinnamon 4 and vice-versa.
Anyway, I'm typing this on Arch Linux 64-bit with GNOME 3.2.1 and a few (needed!) shell extensions. I find it fine and I thought I would be a GNOME 3 hater but I'm actually not.
Shh.
I liked the look of Gnome 3, but missed the functionality of Gnome 2...
Cinna-Mint, anyone?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Excellent idea, stupid name. But, excellent idea. Mate is the way to go for LM12 (IMHO), and I'm sure this will be a very popular decision.
sig: sauer
I have been railing against the dumbing down of the user interface ever since Gnome 2 came out. With the KDE 4 going all stupid and Gnome going that way, I'm glad someone had the knowledge and balls to just fork it and keep going!
Whatever they do, they need to make sure that they do everything in their power to keep away the self-labeled "UI designers" who have fucked over GNOME, Firefox, and numerous other major open source projects lately.
These people may think they know how to create a usable UI, but experience shows that they have no fucking idea what they're doing. Just look at how damn unusable Firefox is these days. The menus are gone, the status bar is gone, the protocol in the URL bar is gone. It's hard to get anything done in Firefox. Sure, I can dig through the settings to re-enable those things that should never have been disabled by default, but that takes far too much effort. It's easier to ditch Firefox. The same goes for GNOME. The "designers" fucked up its UI, and now it's unusable. Now we see real software developers trying desperately to fix the situation.
It's more harmful to an open source project to let them contribute than it is to constantly shut them down. Do not respond to them on mailing lists or IRC. Do not let them get any sort of commit rights. Close any "usability" bugs they open. Do not let them participate in any way.
Only let actual software developers create UIs. They may not be pretty, but at least they'll be functional and much better than anything "designed" by the "UI designers" that have ruined GNOME and Firefox.
A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome. Just Gnome, we didn't have to call it Gnome 2.x. Now we have Gnome 2.x, plain Gnome 3.x, Unity, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions, MATE and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?
I'm still happily using Gnome 2.x (on LMDE), but it won't last forever :/
Why fork it?
WTF? fluxbox over featured? There are not many window managers that have noticeably fewer features, windows 3.0, and twm, although I think that the config file of twm actually has more features, IIRC bash 3 uses more memory than any of the *box window managers.
Work bio at MMWD
You're free to carry on using whatever you like but the rest of us want a usable desktop.
. . . was already forked. Yeah. I'm pretty sure Gnome Shell "forked" it up proper.
So you're like the "I don't own a TV" guy.
Nobody cares that you don't care. Get over yourself. Seriously.
Funny because what you consider a great WM started as a fork....
GNOME has always had the shittiest developer and user community of all of the major Linux desktop projects. This is because politics, rather than the development of practical software, have been its driving force.
It was initially created to "fight" against KDE, solely because KDE was using Qt and Qt had a proprietary license at the time. There wasn't any technical need for GNOME. Most people were quite pleased with KDE and its abilities. So GNOME wasn't even addressing a real technological deficiency in the first place.
Their architectural approach has been rather fucked up, too. Instead of using a true object-oriented language like C++, Objective-C, Python, Java, Smalltalk, or one of the many other OO languages out there at the time, they instead chose to create GObject. For those who don't know, GObject is a horrible kludge to add pseudo-object-oriented capabilities to C. It's a unholy mess of macros and other stupidity, and the result is completely shitty. Don't take my word for it. Go use it yourself! See how horrible of an experience it is compared to using a real UI toolkit like Qt, or Cocoa, or wxWidgets, or even MFC or Swing.
Then there was the decision to implement it as 50+ separate libraries. Compiling GNOME 2, for instance, is a massive burden.
Recent releases have seen some of the most stupid UI design decisions ever made. It's unbelievable that some of these ideas were proposed, never mind actually implemented!
This is the kind of crap that drives away good software developers, and attracts the lousy ones. Good developers don't care for unnecessary licensing politics. They don't create software when there are perfectly fine alternatives they could use instead. They don't try to craft their own bullshit OO extensions to C, when they can just use C++, or Java, or Objective-C, or Python. They don't create projects that consist of over fifty small libraries that are distributed separately. They don't make stupid UI decisions. Since GNOME isn't developed by good developers like that, the GNOME project has apparently decided to make every mistake possible. That's why the project and its software is in such a sorry state today.
Nothing went wrong. It's going RIGHT. Just like when we had - not just Gnome like you say - but also KDE (and now Trinity), Xfce, LXDE, etc. - oh wait, we still have all those. It's an open world. Options are not circumscribed.
Linux as a whole (kernels, UIs...) has turned into a developers dick size contest. Everybody wags their own, nobody debug/documents/supports appropriately for end users.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
That damn status bar is too much bloat; OpenBox is superior.
Is it just me or isn't this interface more similar to kde and windows than it is to Gnome 2? Gnome 2 had two panels, menu, status icons on top etc this new mint interface is nothing like that... why do people keep saying "Similar to Gnome 2?" They should say "Linux mint forks Gnome Shell to look like KDE and Windows"
Good for you (sincerely). But for the VAST majority this is wonderful news. In the end, we can both be happy.
I don't think people understood that they could make gnome3 do whatever they want.
Suddenly... tantrums.
yeah, you'd have thought that devs would have "grown up" by now, focussing more on end-product with all the responsibilities that entails rather than a somewhat teenage approach that is more based on the developer's egos.
Maybe in another ten years, but I imagine the current crop of devs who participate in this environment will give up, leaving it to a new bunch of kids who perpetuate the same old attitudes.
And a geek needs all of these alleged UI features and the sluggish torpor of a bloated fat desktop which takes longer to customize than it's worth because .......? I'm not saying there aren't people that need all those layers of fat for their reasons, I'm saying I'm not sure I'm one of them. Not being too sheltered from the innards makes Linux fun and keeps command line skills alive. Anyway much of the boring office productivity stuff can be done passably enough on Gdocs in a browser, I did most of that kind of work in Firefox on Tinycore linux for several years and was rarely inconvenienced.
I want to fork Gnome and make it more usable, just so I can call mine the Human Gnome Project.
Anyway, I gave up on gnome when it jumped off the "dumb it down and remove anything resembling configuration" cliff. I moved to KDE and haven't looked back. KDE 4.8 == the sweetness.
The components of GNOME3 are mostly great, but the overall experience is terrible; the thing feels like it's designed for tablets, or as part of a blue-sky interface experiment. They took out most of the options that would've let people make it usable again, and have showed hostility to existing apps and user priorities (screensavers are so 90s? Really?). Compatibility with apps written against GNOME3 libraries is great, especially if we can get most of the good stuff from GNOME2 back.
If the GNOME Foundation doesn't want to deal with this, they should get rid of a lot of the people who made the poor decisions that led them to release a terrible, constraining product.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I have converted all of my systems to XFCE. It feels like an older, simpler and leaner Gnome to me and some of the applets even have better functionality.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Actually, Jon McCann, in an interview, seemed to say that user configurability is a bug, detracting from GNOME presenting a single face to people who might consider switching to GNOME. "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."
What? This fork sounds like it is entirely to create the best end product. Keep the parts that have improved in Gnome 3, but get back the good stuff from Gnome 2.
I've been using Mint for months, it's a good OS. It seems to me that this guy has his head screwed on right - as opposed to those who are desperate to turn their desktop OS into something that only makes sense on a tablet.
which is totally what she said
Please gawd tell me this is going to be coming to Debian in the future.
I am so happy that they did this, KDE and gnome are both going way overboard with the simplistic/minimilistic desktops. I always thought gnome2 was great and was pissed when they changed over to 3 and said fuck the ui in gnome2. thats what I think anyway.
g0t b33r?
And this is why open source will forever win.
It doesn't matter if anyone thinks anything is wrong or right. In fact that is a feature, and kinda the point.
Fork, unite, cross-patch, octopus-merge... you only maintain your parts, and everybody is free to make it how he likes it.
This is why I don't consider Wikipedia as open as it should be. The part that's missing is the "de-centralized" part. Where you can just make a copy-on-write fork with any other instance, automatically merge-in patch sets, etc.
In a way, Wikipedia is a cathedral.
Whatever, I digress. Where was I again?
Oh yeah: Open source is awesome! We are awesome!
what the hell went wrong?
My theory is that everyone who is in any way involved in UI development now thinks they're the next Steve Jobs and that they are justified in imposing their brilliant and unparalleled vision on everyone.
Ha! I don't own a TV. So there. Broadcast TV sucks. I stream all my media watching - what I want when I want. Funny how people are getting defensive over what is actually a very unoriginal /. meme: criticizing cholesterol-clogged, undercooked, over-egged desktop interfaces. And as I'm fond of saying: no non-touchscreen UI has improved conceptually on Mac 1984 all that much in 27 years, bling and ponies notwithstanding.
Then a "Gnome2 theme" should be pretty trivial then?
Otherwise, this kind of fork is exactly what a lot of users have been screaming for since the new UI changes were shoved down everyone's throats.
The community screamed bloody murder and someone decided to "step up" and do the work for the benefit of the rest of us.
Suitable renumeration should be sent in Mint's general direction.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
SEriously thank you lafabre
Look at ubuntu its gone to hell recently. Mint was so godlike and perfect, mint 11 that is. Gnome 3 looks like ubuntu horseshit, and I'm not installing it anymore. Its confusing, ugly and looks like same mobile phone "style" bullshit that is stillbirthing win8. So please fork gnome to look likemint11. It really is far better to use andeven prettier than windows 7
Well blackbox is half the size of openbox and still has a status bar :)
Work bio at MMWD
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems. OS X has even carried compatibility with old apps for at least 5 years, and its been through a major operating system redesign and CPU architecture shift.
Can I do that with the free unix desktop? Sure, vanilla X apps probably work, but every major rev of KDE (haven't tried old gnome apps on newer gnome versions) breaks heaps of old apps. Every version of KDE or Gnome i have ever used since both projects began (i remember compiling KDE 1.0 and QT from source and being impressed :)), i have found "wierd" shit where i can make part of the UI crash or errors thrown on screen.
Please: stop fucking around with eye candy and the colour of the bicycle shed. Debug what you have, get it stable and THEN go about adding new stuff. Just because Windows or OS X has new feature of the month, it doesn't mean you need to kludge a clone of it on top of your DE within 2 weeks in some shitty half-assed way.
"Usability" of a UI is to a certain extent, bullshit. Most users can adapt to design decisions made on your environment. Apple knows this - yes, I wish i could customise the OS X desktop a bit more, but at the end of the day the fact that I can't is no major deal-breaker. Because it actually works. Yes, UI testing can make soemthing a little nicer to use - but if it is full of bugs, crashes, breaks your old apps that you like and generally misbehaves, then all that usability testing and research is WASTED.
I didn't mean this to turn into a big unix-desktop rant, but i've been really wanting to like the unix desktop since 1995. Some aspects of it, I do love. But since the days of say, KDE2 (or gnome equivalent - essentially when we got a usable file manager style desktop), there's been very little actual progress in real world usablity that I can see. Sure, there's new eye candy. Whoopie. Can it help me get shit done better? Not really.... progress appears to have stagnated.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Modularity is a good thing. It's not cutting up things into a lot of small modules (aka "libraries") that's the problem.
It's doing it wrong.
Look at the typical bash shell and GNU utilities we all use every day. They are hundreds of small executables, libraries, etc. But they are not a mess. They all do one thing, and do it well. That's part of the UNIX philosophy, and for a reason.
And about KDE: A monoculture is never good. Even two are not enough for a healthy ecosystem. And what's the problem with forking anyway? It doesn't hurt anyone,and nearly has no overhead. (If you use git and know how to use it.) The fear over "fragmentation" is entirely delusional and pointless. We are not one of those idiotic "everybody must follow his party line, no matter what" systems. We are not a US two party system. :)
In fact, I think every user should have his own fork by default. Where "fork" can mean anything from an empty patch set to fundamental major changes. And everybody should just be able to "subscribe" to whoever else's personal fork, implicitly making that someone else a "distributor" without having to do anything special. So that natural leader/follower structures can arise, and nobody can force anything on anyone.
(Sorry for sounding so angry. I don't mean to say this in a attacking way. I'm just a bit beside myself right now for completely unrelated reasons, and can't switch it off. Your post is still 95% in harmony with my opinions.
Also, there is one additional thing you missed: The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency. And all for the sake of Joe Sixpack, who is a retarded dick anyway, please please loving you... but not really loving you, since you deformed yourself until you talked like a Windows/OSX and walked like a Windows/OSX, and he really only loves you when you have become more Windows/OSX and Windows/OSX itself. In other words: He still won't love you. So quit lying and be yourself! Same as the typical problem geeks have with women, interestingly.)
wm2. or wmx, try it you might like it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Gnome is doing a major breaking change, that is going to cause a huge shift in its user base. Ubuntu created a whole generation of Linux users that were Gnome users by default. Those people are now picking their replacement desktop and well.... that's a good chunk of the /. Linux users.
Nothing went wrong, Gnome's intention was to make this change.
The GP's supposed "unsupported assertions" become very well supported and completely correct if you've used Gnome for more than a day, and they become blatantly obvious if you've ever tried to develop Gnome apps.
You missed the GP's point when it comes to the horrible build system that Gnome has. It's not about the impact on the users, it's about the impact on the developers! Even using jhbuild is a bad experience when compared to using cmake with KDE. It's trivial to build KDE, which makes it much easier for developers to improve it. It takes ages just to set up a Gnome development environment, if you ever want to hack on it.
For a project like Gnome, C++ and Objective-C are just as portable as C is, and were just as portable back when Gnome was first started. Besides, have you ever actually tried the non-C bindings for Gtk+ and Gnome? Only the Python and C++ ones aren't complete rubbish. The rest are crap. But guess what? Qt doesn't need C++ bindings in the first place, and the PyQt bindings are amazing. So it's not like Gtk+ and Gnome are any better off. And don't even start with Vala. It's just Gnome stealing C#, for the most part.
The GP is right, and you're wrong. Gnome's a failure and everything they do is a mistake. They never make the right choice. Never!
The issue is that Windows adopted the Aero interface. That means both Mac and Windows have interfaces vastly more sophisticated than what is available on KDE2. If they didn't do the eye candy work Linux desktop would look a decade behind minimum.
Also there have been features added, for example unified notification, that is all applications being able to send messages to end users in a unified way that is configurable by the end user. That is a major shift for both KDE and Gnome.
As for old apps, this is Linux apps should recompile and be sent out by the distribution. Linux has never sought binary compatibility.
Linux as a whole (kernels, UIs...) has turned into a developers dick size contest. Everybody wags their own, nobody debug/documents/supports appropriately for end users.
Linux as a whole, is the kernel. The kernel. There are different versions, patches, etc. but it's one kernel.
Maybe you mean open source as a whole?
Maybe you mean software as a whole. That would make a whole lot more sense. Except it hasn't "turned in" to anything... it's always been that way.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
I like both Gnome3 and Unity. Sure they are both experiencing teething problems at the moment very similar to KDE4.0 but they will get better. Honestly I and tired of the old Windows95 interface and when I was using Gnome2 I did away with the bottom taskbar/panel in favor of AWN anyways. When I see so many people clinging to the 17year old Windows95 interface of Gnome2
Good comment. Seven people across the world agree.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI.
A stable ABI is the reason why Windows is such a crock of crap and Microsoft can't fix poor decisions made twenty years ago. It's also pointless when most software people run on Linux is open source.
Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.
A year or two ago everybody was happy with Gnome
Clearly, not everyone was as happy as you thought. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many people working on so many alternatives.
and now another kid on the block... what the hell went wrong?
Not a damn thing. You can use gnome 2.x until MATE is working well enough to replace it. It's really the same thing.
I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI. I've used fvwm, twm, windowmaker, enlightenment, kde, gnome 1, gnome 2, xfce, unity, gnome shell (with extensions). Honestly I think these things just keep improving over time. But seriously. If you are a romantic masochist, just install the window manager that emulates the amiga workbench and be done with it.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
While I agree that there has been progress on the unified notification, there has been 3D accelerated composited desktops (which IMO look better than Aero and Aqua) for a while now in the form of Compiz. Yeah, it may be tacked on, but in many ways, it can integrate well with Metacity and Kwin. I even still use it in KDE4 over it's built in compositing as it adds more options, and generally runs faster (for me anyways). I never really understood why neither desktop just didn't stick with that instead of reinventing the wheel.
Actually i was more referring to the rip offs of spotlight/windows search, launchpad, etc., but good point. A new Windows feature is no excuse for Linux being broken. Haven't tried it recently, but when the composted desktop was first implemented, it broke openGL apps (unless turned back off). Wtf. I'd rather have my OpenGL apps work than some desktop candy. Its probably fixed now, but an instance of my point about stuff being rushed out the door "half-assed". Sound is another example. Fix the mixer at a system level once properly rather than rooting around with sound daemon of the month.
Am aware of this, and this is why it is still a niche (and will remain so). End user doesn't care for recompiling apps, they do care about app X going away and rendering their workflow broken. However, unless you're manually installing old libraries (which may not work with newer versions of system libraries, new compilers, etc), even a recompile often isn't possible to get the old apps back.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I consider Fluxbox over-featured only because I don't like or want a taskbar, so I use Openbox.
I don't use a minimalist wm because of a minimalism fetish though. I primarily want something that is:
The crazy thing is, it's quite difficult to achieve all of these.
I'm not sure if you've used Windows recently, but its actually quite a way away from being a crock of crap. Resource intensive? Yes. RAM is cheap. All my hardware works properly, virtually all of my apps work properly, and I'm not having to go track down old versions of library X to recompile simply to find myseilf mired in dependency hell.
Don't get me wrong: Windows is no shining example of desktop design. But in terms of getting shit done with a minimum of fucking around fixing broken shit - we're not in 1995 any more.
I agree, being WILLING to break compatibility to FIX or IMPROVE is arguably a strength. My point is that people are breaking compatibility more often due to bikeshedding, rather than any fundamental need to do so.
The appearance to me, having tracked Linux and the unix desktop in general since 1995 is that waves of new programmers hit a project every few years, decide that they can reinvent the wheel better than the last guy (or that whatever Apple/Microsoft did last week is a must have), break a heap of stuff rewriting in flavour of the month language/programming paradigm and end up with essentially the same real world functionality we had 5 years ago but with double the resource usage - and broken apps.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The community has beating Gnome over the head for months now. But Gnome stubbornly refuses to go back to their less FUBAR interface.
What the hell is wrong with them?
Oh well, at least there's forking.
PROTIP: Xmonad: The source is small that you can read it yourself: 1200 lines. I'm not kidding! And yet it's one of the most featureful ones I know. Also that makes it really easy to adapt it. And fast, obviously.
You don't need to learn Haskell just to use it though. (Although one gains so so much from that, that in retrospect it feels absurd not to learn it.)
There's a number of users making it do what they want but they're running up against nonsense, like having to edit files in a specific order.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Must... resist... must... resist.... AAGGHH!!
REMUNERATION
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Your a LOOSER, so their!
Just please stop expressing your opinion about things you don't know, would you? ...and I'm not having to go track down old versions of library X to recompile simply to find myseilf mired in dependency hell. you have not used any major GNU/Linux distros over the last few years.
Based on this:
I have not used Windows since 2003 at home and the last time I had to do things you mention was ... I don't exactly remember.
The appearance to me, having tracked Linux and the unix desktop in general since 1995
Please don't mix taking a look fooling around with giving a real try to use over at least a few weeks period of time.
As for Windows desktop usability: still no virtual desktops in Win7? No comment...Go enjoy
The model of having to redownload apps is the model on iOS. End users seem fine with it. Under the Linux distribution model end users don't have to recompile apps but distributions do.
If you want slower turnover, and don't want to recompile, and long term app support have you considered Debian?
I agree all the desktops don't do much Q&A. I find the general lack of quality in Linux pretty infuriating. But I understand, QA takes a lot of money and a lot of time. That being said, things working the same way for almost 20 years is why I like WindowMaker when I can.
Compiz subs out fine for Mutter or KWin. Almost all the distributions include it. Mandriva and Suse both do this subout.
Same thing that happened to KDE, dear friend. It got to 3.5 and looked like it was really on its game, just needed a few more improvements. Then KDE 4 came out and that was the end of that game.
I for one don't understand why people get all emotionally attached to their old UI.
Muscle memory.
Once you've gotten used to using a specific UI for years on end, the commands are basically hard-coded into your body. Changing this takes a lot of time and effort and you will often find yourself automatically doing things the old way.
If anything, this will probably be good for the greater Gnome community. It means that Mint can have its desktop and applications based upon the same tools (Gnome 3.x libraries & applications, Gnome 3.x-based desktop). The developers of libraries and apps for Gnome will have a larger userbase, more people testing, and more developers looking at and using their code.
My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.
And multiple virtual desktops with a decent sized monitor are over-rated. Having used them extensively back in the early 00s, i can't say i desperately miss them. And as to enjoying Windows 7, well i have to use it at work, but my desktop of choice is currently OS X.
But, keep denying the problems exist if it makes you feel better. The lack of new users putting up with random BS in the free unix desktop will enable you to feel "leet" for a while yet. Personally, i can't be fucked dealing with it any more. I don't care how shiny it is ,if it doesn't work properly.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Not sure what iOS has to do with this. An end user does need to recompile their apps if the distribution discontinues support for it. Assuming the dependent libraries are still available on the new platform, or can be compiled against the new system without problems.
I ran Debian for 10 years and yes as far as Linux goes it is my distribution of choice. But it still suffers the same problems, just at a slower pace. If i want to run a proper unix (vs OS X) i run FreeBSD. The quality and change control in the base OS is far superior to what i've experienced in the Linux world, however the desktop environment world is still a pain in the arse. It wouldn't be so bad if actual progress was made, but as I said, most of it appears to be bikeshed related.
I too like Windowmaker, i just wish GNUstep would take off so that there was a decent level of source compatibiity with OS X.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Can we mention the white elephants in the room? Debian and RHEL don't play fast-and-loose, they just scoop the cream from the churn. We're pointing fingers at Ubuntu and Fedora, which aim to be cutting-edge. We're playing with fire, and screaming bloody murder when we get burnt on our desktops, but I think the whole server thing is working out.
...but seriously, while the Gnome developers could have done more on getting the configuration tools out there for the desktop, once you begin getting a handle on the configuration, it's not bad. Just different.
Ubuntu's Unity is the one I have a problem with. It feels like I'm running a netbook even though I don't own one.
> Broadcast TV sucks. I stream all my media watching - what I want when I want.
So you're basically still a media consumption unit beholden to what the corporations dictate you'll watch.
Since you've taken the first step of jettisoning your TV, why not try now to break the addiction? Stop watching TV shows.
Can we mention the white elephants in the room?
but I think the whole server thing is working out.
What you're talking about is irrelevant and off-topic. Most linux servers do not have GUIs installed and even when they do, most linux server apps do NOT use the GUI stuff. So no problems with GNOME, KDE, X, or lack of backward compatibility with GUI libraries/APIs.
Spot on.
GObject has features C++ doesn't include natively, like type introspection.
Besides, what's wrong with C for a low-level API? You can connect just about any C-based API to a higher level language.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You're right. I just love the speed of a light desktop running all from ram even on old machines. Like AC, I want it to work sufficiently though for the set of use cases I use. You can still have drag and drop, configure to open applications when you click on a file, set keyboard shortcuts etc. What else is really needed? But I'd probably draw the line at Ratpoison - just that bit too hair shirt.
When I've run Gnome or KDE, it's usually because some package I needed insisted on parts of one of those as dependencies eg k3b. I know the major interfaces have to keep one eye on a touchscreen future, despite the fact that tablets and smartphones are being dominated by iOS and Android and the latter is already free. And they've done this dance where they built in a huge amount of complexity to enable features and then they go and disable features.
This is it in a nutshell... I was monumentally p'd off with the removal of configuration options and stuff hiding in the Gnome Registry... It was as if they'd decided what it was going to look like and to hell with anyone who wanted to change things...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Yes! I want to second this for the only reason that I want people like this to get some encouragement from the community. Make it better for all of us, please! (and thank you :)
I wish them the best and look forward to it. I recently discovered, or more accurately installed, Linux Mint. I have been using ubuntu since 6.06 or so, and I don't like the direction they are going. I have tried and failed to like Unity. I dived into xubuntu a bit which is not bad, before deciding to give LM a good try. I have to say, I like their attitude and their "political" position... if something works and is good, use it. Nevermind the OSS politics, closed source is OK for some libraries and drivers, if that's what is available. Just make it work. This is a refreshing change from the purist OSS view, which in my opinion is harming the movement more than helping it. Take for example the sad state of open source wireless drivers. I can't even begin to mention how many times I have installed or upgraded a Linux distro, and lost all wireless functionality for sometimes _days_ at a time. Searching for a solution that works "with this specific version of this distro" is a load of bullshit. Most of the so-called solutions are nothing more than hacks anyway. Oh, and somewhere down the line some obscure library or driver binary gets automatically updated and breaks the whole fucking thing again. I'm really tired of it. LM seems to focus on getting things to work, and that's the way it should be. There will always be Gentoo or Debian or other roll-your-own distros for those that want that level of control or purism, but I want an OS that works and is not a fragile house of cards waiting to collapse. At the moment, it seems LM is closest to that ideal. I still have several machines running various flavors and versions of ubuntu, but that may change in the near future.
such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems
What makes you able to run such apps is not a stable ABI but an active Microsoft effort to provide backwards compatibility. One of the thigns that Microsoft has always tried very hard is to be compatible with the majority of software which is already run. That's why you have all those compatibility modes (Bill Gates mentioned in an interview that before releasing Win95 his team went to a local supermarket to buy all the software available so they could test it).
On the Open Source side, nobody really cares about that. Instead, you have comments like 0123456 saynig that it is a "feature" when you are not able to run some program after updating your OS:
Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
And make sure it gets copied to bash.org or whatever. This is a new classic!
captcha: patched
I don't get it. Why should I have to change the way I've worked for a decade because some UI designer rearranged the rooms in a blind man's house? I have made a living for a long time as a software developer, and have a productive system that works for me. Why should I have to change everything on the whim of someone who isn't helping me earn a living? Much easier to switch to KDE than learn Gnome 3.
IOS has the same model you are saying is unacceptable. On IOS after a OS upgrade any number of apps can be broken. However, the end user redownloads those apps from the app store. Apple can and does break binary compatibility all the time and upgrading is a regular part of the process.
End users don't have any problem with it at all. They don't care about poor binary compatibility as long as they can redownload easily and their data remains intact. What IOS does is provides a counter example to your theory that end users demand binary compatibility over the Linux distribution system.
Linux does not have or want a binary compatibility model. If you disagree with that, you disagree with a fundamental design choice of the product. It is not a lack of change control but a lack of Linux doing something it has never asserted any interest in doing. For open source apps the model is the distribution recompiles. For closed source apps the model is becoming the app releases itself with a specific version of the OS and runs inside a VM.
I think you are wrong that it is a bad thing. I consider the distribution model to be a huge plus of Linux, one of my favorite thing about it, and when I'm on Windows or OSX and having to deal with 40 different vendors and contracts and license management and working through products that are only semi compatible and lie to me about when they are going to update, it is misery. And this vs. something like "yum update (package name)". I'll take the Linux model any day. But your problem isn't KDE or Gnome it goes back to Linus.
It is funny you mention BSDs. With BSDs I have to recompile all the time. I like ports but I don't find the platform binary stable. I actually find myself dealing with source related issues more often.
Anyway... a very stable Unix with good binary support I'd have said Solaris. Probably the only one left at this point is AIX that really does what you want, and IBM's commitment to AIX is iffy.
They've forked GNOME Shell not the entire GNOME library. Thus GNOME compatibility fears expressed in the comments are unfounded.
I think someone with the power to change the title and body should do so. Else Slashdot could turn into a media for spreading misinformation and half-truths.
If no `shell-extentions` and the `gnome-tweaks-tool`, Gnome3 is only useless and ugly as hell. I know some javascript but what the hell? Why am I obliged to transform my wife as a JavaScript programmer just to change the ugly too big fonts and Gtk3 themes ? That's the main stupid ommisions from the Gnome3 devs. They should have put the basic preferences ui from the start. With Mint12 MSGE, Clement Lefebvre included `tweaked` external dependency tools out of the box - at least!
I am an old geezer, having started with Unix in the early 90's and migrated to Linux in 2005. We are creatures of habit, and we get accustomed to where to find things when things go wrong, and what to do to get around limitations in some commands.
If I were to create a new UI, (heaven forbid), I would not take the Gnome or Unity model. Here are my thoughts.
With wide screens, I would like to have two desktops, one on each left-right half of the screen, as if I had two monitors, with each desktop protected from the other. "Code on one, and documentation on the other", or "Emails on one and something else on the other" are two examples.
I have become accustomed to the Microsoft Ribbon concept as it applies to MS office, and am thinking how it could be applied to a GUI interface as a top, side or bottom panel. These are thoughts, nothing more. In a way, the ribbon concept is just the same old gnome2 menu, with some tweaks.
What I do like in the new incarnations of some gui interfaces is the popback facility. That is, I like to not have to thread through the top of the tree through some level of menus to choose the appropriate utility if I clicked inappropriately.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I think it is a great idea, and to the points about the Gnome 3 and Cinnamon diverging, yes they will diverge. But I bet Gnome will die and most linux platforms will adopt Cinnamon. Good work guys. Stick something in there eye :)
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't own a TV, and I'm not alone in this. Several of my coworkers also don't own TVs. What can I say, the internet age is upon us.
GObject is better in some ways than C++. And it's flat out better than X toolkit intrinsics (Xt, the thing used to make Xaw and Motif and a few others) in all ways I can imagine.
gtk+ has bindings for one more popular language than Qt. so chew on that.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The GNOME designers have a totalitarian mind set. They act as comunist planners, they pretend to know what the users need better that the actual users.
To succeed, the free software must be built as any product in a free market: to satisfy the users demand.
There is a distro called PearOS that has done precisely that. It's an Ubuntu derivative, has taken Gnome3, made it look & feel identical to OS-X and has run w/ it.
That one is a complete distro, and that too, the Pear App Store is largely in French, but my suggestion here - do what the Pear guys have done, and fork Gnome3 not to make a Gnome2 UI, but rather, make a complete OS-X lookalike, and put it out there, alongside KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, GNUSTEP and others. It would be a good target for people who like OS-X but can't afford Apples. In fact, combine such a distro w/ PC-BSD, and you have the perfect way of having OS-X on your non-Apple PCs, w/o invoking any Apple lawsuits.
Yup. It's like 3 "on switches", and gnome3 is almost indistinguishable from 2.
Does anyone else see a parallel with GPL versions?
GPL v2 was decent and widely used, but the arrogant overseers decided to overstep their bounds when updating to a new point release, ignoring community feedback and concerns. While some people followed willingly to GPL v3, many simply jumped ship to licenses with less onerous terms, such as MIT, ASL, etc.
I wish someone would fork GPL v2 and keep the legal strength improvements while jettisoning the forced patent licensing and "de-Tivoising" provisions. I'm fed up with RMS's proselytizing.
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI.
That is why Android will probably end up being the consumer Linux OS.
Open Source Sushi
You don't have to (and I don't, generally) use ports with the BSDs.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Dashboard (the spotlight equivalent) was announced before spotlight was. Indexing, started in GNOME first. In fact with Zeitgeist we are taking it to the next level. For instance, it's possible to click on a file and get all the git version logs on it. How many versions did it have etc. KDE is following suit as well. So, Linux desktops are innovating. You're giving an opinion without trying anything recent. I suggest you try Fedora 16, or Ubuntu or whatever and try both KDE and GNOME and see how they fare. You might also consider that GNOME now has http://extensions.gnome.org/ which can now modify your desktop behavior. GNOME 3 will continue to evolve and because we now use web technologies to rapidly change behavior we'll be able to try out new UI faster than both Mac and PC.
My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.
The point is nobody ever does that. I have never done it. GP has never done it. Nobody here (except you, apparently) has ever needed to do that. This must be some seriously precious software if you need it that badly. For everybody else, if it isn't being actively developed anymore, there is likely a better alternative available.
I find that on Windows, app developers are exceedingly lazy. They originally develop their software for a target, say Win95, and then they never update the app ever. They just rebundle and call it new version X! And because Microsoft maintains backwards-compatibility so well, this actually works the majority of the time (there were issues for some with XP service packs and Vista/7 upgrades). So if new features are introduced, dialogs refactored, library cruft removed, older functions deprecated in favor of newer functions that do the same thing better, all things that can make the app run better and more smoothly (especially with respect to things like hardware utilization), none of that gets used by the app, because they never clean it up and get rid of the crap. If it breaks, they are forced to. But since it doesn't, they don't bother.
Muscle memory.
I wish it were that simple. But the things you hear people complain most loudly about usually have nothing to do with muscle memory. "it doesn't need all this eyecandy" is one of the most common complaints, presumably because it doesn't run so well on old hardware. The scrollbars are a big issue with Unity, but hey look they _work_ exactly the same as they did before, you just have to mouse over it to see it.
With linux desktops, you're not really using it unless you've got your hotkeys configured anyway... AFAIK there aren't any DE's that simply remove the option to change your keybinds.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
As the title says: It's not only the dumb Gnome developers. There are others as well and they are just as much to blame as those arrogant Gnome people. When Gnome showed Gnome 3, the major Linux distributions had to sit together and come with a statement towards Gnome that they did not want this. This way Gnome could either go on in their own stubborn way, or decide to not do it and keep working on Gnome 2. Either way, we wouldn't have had Gnome 3.
Do you all notice what has been going on for the last half year or so? Gnome released the Hell they call Gnome 3 and the distribution developers work night and day to come up with something they can put on top of it to make it at least a little usable: Ubuntu invented Unity, which to me is about the same as the Gnome Shell, Mint comes with MGSE (a bunch of extensions to try to bring back the old interface which Gnome killed), Mate (a Gnome 2 fork which is not stable yet and which also doesn't bring back the old feeling) and now Cinnamon (the latest idea to return to what was). Look at all the effort put into these attempts, the time and money this has cost already. And why? To clean up the mess Gnome made. And Gnome? They are laughing out loud because they get support without having to do anything, although they are the ones to blame for this mess.
People, stop using Gnome completely. Let them feel what they came up with is not what we want. Only by a massive refusal to use it will turn the tide. But it means we all have to do it, otherwise it won't work.
Be wise, be sensible and choose another DE than the hell Gnome is giving us.