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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."
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 :/
Unlike what the summary suggests, it's not a Gnome 3 fork but just a Gnome Shell fork. With the whole back end untouched, they should be able to keep compatibility issues to a minimum.
. . . 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.
If no one tries, it never happens. GNOME3 with its GNOME shell sucks ass and turns a desktop into a netbook candy toy interface. Perhaps if they are successful at giving it older/better functionality, then after the public appreciates it, they might merge it in with GNOME3 in some way.
GNOME3 shell extensions need to be better managed and maintained. My second attempt at using Fedora... this time 16 is still a failure as far as I'm concerned. The extensions idea is nice but it doesn't inherently manage the options. What resulted was a GNOME3 shell that wouldn't load unless I kept shuffling extensions to try to get what I want. GNOME3 and its extensions interface does not account for or manage the extensions which are present and running. (It seems kind of obvious to me that when a UI element is being manipulated in some way by an extension, a 'lock' preventing other extensions from acting on it should be created and enforced.)
I have heard there is now some sort of central extensions repository and I hope it alleviates the extensions mess I experienced but I think over this holiday time, I am going to load CentOS 6.x instead of Fedora.
Lately it seems software projects are refusing to listen to their users and it shows. GNOME3's shell, Firefox and SME server are three that have affected me in a large way and none of them seem interested in listening to the feedback.
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?"
Or perhaps you're talking about the status bar. Again, something I can't believe anyone would notice or care about. A largely blank, useless bar that was practically only good for previewing link URLS was removed from the GUI and replaced with something smarter. Again, how is this a major change?
Useless to you, perhaps. But the replacement is a kludge for tiny screens that's a horrible mess on a desktop with a decently sized monitor. I find it's contnually covering up things I want to click on all for the sake of not 'wasting' a few pixels on a 1920x1080 monitor; it's annoying, it's ugly and it provides no benefit over the old status bar.
You make it difficult for people who actually have good, valid criticism and feedback of GNOME 3, etc., to be heard, because you dilute the discussion with completely bizarre, emotional, thoughtless statements.
Or perhaps you just don't bother to understand why people want these 'useless' features.
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."
You've made a number of unsupported assertions there. And of course since you talk as if you know what you are talking about you've been modded up.
I can't disagree with your take on the politics. I do take issue with the technology. Gnome certainly has had problems with being over-designed and over-abstracted. And I won't argue with your assertion about stupid UI choices.
Compiling Gnome, though, is pretty easy using but time consuming using jhbuild. Most users of course aren't affected in the least by the build process. Qt's build process is self-contained, but takes hours still. The end result is really the same for end users. Having every widget toolkit re-implement every wheel is fairly tiresome. Why not use lower-level libraries like libxml that already work well, and most importantly, are C-based.
As for the language, basing it on C was a wise choice. It's a far more portable language than C++ or Objective C, and *way* easier to bind other languages too. The GObject model works very well in other languages. Programming GTK+ in C++ is a joy (doesn't need moc either). GTK+ in Python is slick too, and actually manages to be fairly pythonic, unlike PyQt, which is really just C++ code in a python syntax.
Writing new GObject code is a chore, since there's a lot of boilerplate code to implement vtables, etc, but using GObject apis in regular C code is quite easy. I don't think Gobject is a BS OO extension anymore than C++ is. Functionally and under the hood they are fairly equivalent. No language support is a pain, but Vala is nice for providing that. I basically consume GObject code in other languages, and there has never been any issue there.
The tl;dr version of this post is that when you say that Gnome has made every mistake possible and that C and Gobject are responsible for Gnome being in a sorry state strikes me as being a rather baseless claim.
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.)
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.
The world has moved on from the 1990s desktop. Windows 8 is replacing the Start menu with a radical new touch interface, and OS X Lion has adopted iOS features. Mobile operating systems that look and feel nothing like desktop operating systems are a huge hit. The 1990s desktop paradigm is dead in the mainstream, and Linux software developers are trying to progress computing forward by appealing to people outside of tech forums. That means reducing the insane amount of configurability and feature-itis that often ails Linux desktop software.
You may consider it abhorrent, but you are a minority. The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.
I use my computer as a tool. And as such it must be efficient. If make a hammer from soft rubber justifying that "common user might get hurt when using metal hammers" then you are making a goddamn toy, not a tool. And that is exactly what Gnome crew is doing. I get that they are trying to make an impressive interface for tablet PC, but why should regular PC users suffer? Would it hurt them to go play in a "Gnome-Tablet" version of the interface without crippling the desktop version? Those that would not need customizability and would be happy with all the bling could play with the new interface all they want and those that do any actual work could continue to do so without switching DEs.
Yes and no.
It's the "Silicon Valley effect".
That is, some guys change stuff in the UI and declare it's where the innovation is. It's not that it's good. It's just different, and backed with strong advertising (Apple, etc).
Then others feel they *have* to follow a similar path to survive and "have something new to announce". Otherwise, you're not news worthy, etc, etc.
I also call it being blind :P
It's fine to copy concepts, but copy the ones that are actually good.
The rest of the world uses computers simply as a tool, not as a hobby.
The rest of the world uses windows or OS X.
I find it odd that FOSS advocates are willing to reject much of what they find useful with desktop enviornments to make them more appealing to people who will likely never use them...