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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.
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 :/
Stupid name? Cinnamon vs GNOME? Come to think about it all these years I've been telling people "I use GNOME", I wonder how that sounded to them. Maybe I should have been putting emphasis on the G or something and made it sound like a rapper name. "I use gee-nome dawg".
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.
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.
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.
My mother overheard a conversation I was having about a certain linux distribution. After the conversation she asked "who is Debbie and why are you talking about her open sores?"
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
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.
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.
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.)
You won't get security patches, you won't get any new functionality, new apps that use GTK3 won't work right with it, the underpinnings will change and Gnome2 itself will no longer work right.
When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?
Last few years GNOME has been same. Even KDE SC 4.8 has now more features than KDE 3.5 had and when compared to amount of those, GNOME has almost none.
GNOME 2.x users are going to be fine as long as just their needed applications can be ran on it.
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 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.
When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?
Somewhere in the last year or so it got one of those Windows-style 'Program Load of Bollocks is not responding, do you really want to shut down?' dialog boxes that made me want to uninstall it almost overnight. One of the things I've always liked about Linux is that I could tell it to shut down and walk away, knowing that when I came back in two weeks it would actually have shut down, unlike Windows where it would be sitting there at some stupid dialog box waiting for a response it would never get.
And then the Gnome morons had to go and add one just to fsck it up.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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."
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'
The Mint developers have removed the engines from their cars and attached teams of mules. The next release to be known as Borax.
yeah, and the Gnome designers designed a car that has only one stick, nothing else, no weel, no pedals, no buttons no nothing, but a single stick ... then you to take it to the freeway, and everything is fine until you get in an intersection and it starts to rain, and you need to steer, change gears and start the windshield wipers in the same time ...