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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."
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."
I disagree with you. As a vendor, I find shipping gnome to be a nightmare. It had a ridiculous number of dependancies and is rather unpleasant to build. I haven't looked much at the Gnome 3 stuff yet so perhaps they've improved it, but Gnome 2 had dependancies on webkit and firefox. What kind of idiot thought that up? Epiphany rocks with webkit, but using libxul to get help is stupid. It should be ported to webkit.
Further, the gnome community only cares about Linux. if you're not a linux distro, they don't take upstream patches and they don't like you. Considering what Ubuntu went through with them (not that i agree with all the ubuntu changes), I'm not shocked to set yet another fork of gnome. I think this fork will fail on the sheer weight. Too many things depend on parts of gnome and you'll end up trying to track updated libraries yet trying to keep old code running. It gets ugly.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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.
Are you joking? They absolutely are a mess, and I say that as someone who uses them every day. I'm just not fooling myself into thinking they're not a mess. UNIX shells and utils have had a chaotic development history and are chock full of bad design. Most of the good utils do a lot more than one thing, and they are usually far less than excellent, just good enough to suffice if you fight them long enough to get them to do what you want. And don't get me started on the gaping abyss of existential Lovecraftian horror that is shell code, or (shudder) Perl. (and I even like perl! But it's also an eldritch tool of the Many-Angled Ones.)
The only reason the entire lot hasn't been incinerated and replaced by saner tools with better and more consistent design is that there's far too much legacy code out there which depends on the behavior of existing UNIX shells, tools, and scripting languages. Just look Plan 9. Even though it was very much a UNIX-philosophy OS, only more so, and better designed than the original, by the same people who designed UNIX in the first place, it failed to gain any traction because it came far too late. UNIX already had unstoppable critical mass.
You're falling into the trap of believing that the ideal is the practice. UNIX started out as a very hacky OS because squeezing advanced features into a PDP-7 was Hard. The subsequent 40 years of continuous and divergent development, little of it done by people primarily concerned with "do-one-thing-and-do-it-well", have left that ethos in tatters.
You're also falling into the trap of believing without rational reason that one philosophy of software design is best for everything. One-thing-and-do-it-well is a fine idea for a software environment intended to filter text through independently written programs, but it might not work so great for easy to learn and use GUIs.
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.
Okay, so you're a crazy guy.
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.
This is not even on the same planet as right and wrong.
I know and support a lot of people who use their computers as a tool and not as a hobby. The more tech-savvy (and even those only somewhat tech-savvy) have a good idea of how they want to interact with the computer - being pissed of by unnecessary graphical effect and/or limited configuration possibilities in newer versions of what they are using (be that Windows, Gnome, KDE, all the way down to specific applications - doesn't matter!). The not so tech-savvy people (mostly older people, frankly) learned to use the desktop metaphor and when confronted with something different they're feeling and acting insecure because they don't have the mindset to adapt to such huge changes rapidly enough not to be complete thrown off by them. That's because they wouldn't have to. Those are the people who started working with computers in this century and use them as tools to get specific tasks done and nothing else. Frankly this means that the target audience for the intended improvements in usability in these new interfaces consists mostly of people who will have a hard time adapting to something so radically different. For people who never really used a computer it makes no difference, of couse as they start from scratch anyway. So I'm wondering whether those UI designers actually conducted some meaningful usability studies with some REAL people before getting to the drawing board trying to reach nerdgasm by ripping of broken UI concepts from apple et al.; heck, the reduced usability even doesn't have to do with people exclusively... basic issues arise even from ignoring what kind of input and output devices will be used... Metro Launcher on a 27" screen + mouse and keyboard? WTF? Unity is the same, as is Gnome3! Touch for regular office work? Not so much! More mouse then? Yeah... your wrists will thank those braindead ui designers... I'm not even arguing that keyboard navigation is usually faster - everyone knows that. KDE shines here - I haven't seen such a good use of the activities (which can be used easily to accommodate to different form factors) concept anywhere else and while coming with sane default configurations for big and small screens where you wouldn't have to change anything you're still empowered to make it your own completely by mostly easy and well structured configuration options. Heck, even Windows shines here as there are a gazillion programs and more or less documented tweaks with which you can tune it for your needs.