GNOME: Staring Into the Abyss

New submitter zixxt writes "GTK+ Developer Benjamin Otte talks about the stagnation and decline of the Gnome Project. He describes how core developers are leaving GNOME development, how GNOME is understaffed, why GNOME is a Red Hat project and why GNOME is losing market and mind share. Is the Gnome project on its deathbed? Quoting: 'I first noticed this in 2005 when Jeff Waugh gave his 10×10 talk. Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project. In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places.'"

Comments

Re:chasing the "dumb it down" crowd

[Shikaku]

XFCE is still around and became my desktop after Gnome2 support was dropped on Arch Linux.

Linux Mint also has Cinnamon.

Re:Reason? GNOME3

[jmorris42]

Here is a hint. It is one of the strengths of Linux from a certain way of looking at it.

Attaching and detaching a display from a laptop is something no DE is ever going to make 'just work' for everyone. You use case might sometimes be just what the developer was thinking, others you will lose. On the 'other' platforms you just live with it, we have options. On my laptop the F7 key is silkscreened with display/panel in blue, meaning Fn+F7 is the approved way and what would work on the 'other' OS. So to make it easy to remember I bound CTRL-F7 to a script.

It examines the state of the dock and doesn't try to 'do the right thing' for anyone and everyone, it does exactly what [I] want for either state. With only a little more work (when I get a spare round tuit) I'll extend it to look at the VGA port and deal with the presence of a projector automagically. Yes I means I have to hit a hot key when the automatics do the wrong thing (almost every time) but it means I always get what I want and it beats filing bug reports that get closed WONTFIX when the distro goes out of support and just bitching about it being broken.

#!/bin/bash

BUSDOCK=/sys/bus/platform/devices/dock.0/
DOCKED=`cat ${BUSDOCK}/docked`

if [ "$DOCKED" == 1 ] ; then
        echo "Docked"
        xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --mode 1024x768 --rotate normal --pos 0x0 --primary --output VGA1 --off
        sleep 2
        xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --rotate normal --pos 0x0 --primary \
                          --output LVDS1 --auto --right-of HDMI2 --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect"
fi
if [ "$DOCKED" == 0 ] ; then
        echo "Undocked"
        xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --mode 1024x768 --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect" \
                      --primary --output HDMI2 --off --output VGA1 --off
        sleep 2
        xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect" --primary
fi

Re:Reason? GNOME3

[M. Baranczak]

just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion

Git was never intended as a replacement for Subversion. From the way that Torvalds talked about Subversion, I doubt he ever even used it. Git was a replacement for BitKeeper - which worked on a distributed-repository model, just like Git.