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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.'"
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything. The warning signs were there for years before. The attitude of a few dictating what was 'best' for the users, even when the users were screaming NO! NO! NO! started with the GNOME2 rewrite. They finally listened to some of the loudest arguments that time and restored enough functionality that it could become the standard Free Desktop.
GNOME3 turned that stupid up to eleven though, putting it a whole different category. It is explicitly declared it OK if any/all existing users leave, a pure "my way to the highway" deal. It is pretty much accepted that it is unusable on a standard desktop with a mouse and this isn't debatable as an issue in need of repair. The only rational explanation is that somehow, someone in that project assumes they are going to get an OEM preload deal on tablets somewhere. But GNOME's hardware requirements are higher than Android so it won't be some low end creep into the market through the back door deal, it will have to be on somebody's mid to top end hardware. Maybe RedHat has struck the deal in secret already and we are all going to be in awe of their mad negotiating skills. But it isn't the way to bet.
Or perhaps they assume that Win8 will force everyone to accept touchscreens and everything running maximized... even on 27" displays... so they just want to be there first, like how Compiz was doing the Vista eye candy a year or so before Vista shipped. Doubtful. If Win8 doesn't quickly get a recognizable default desktop on desktop class hardware users will just insist on Win7. Everything doesn't benefit from a touchscreen, keyboards and mice still have a place and aren't likely to go the way of the dodo anytime soon.
Guess if the article is right about the number of active devs left it really doesn't matter anymore because there doesn't appear to be enough left to rewrite their way out the the GNOME Shell disaster. Several of the alternates have similar manpower except KDE which has much more. It was a good desktop, it will be missed.
Democrat delenda est
"Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2."
GNOME 3 is *worse* than GNOME 2. By far. Plus more.
GNOME was a good thing until version 3. It changed everything.
Mod up. The purpose of a DE is to enable the user to get his work done as fast and as efficiently as possible. Not eye-candy bullshit. If you can imlement eye candy that doesn't hinder or get in the way, I'm all for that, but never forget: **Enable the user to get work done fast**
The big issue with many modern desktops including Gnome and Win8 is they are hell bent on chasing the "dumb it down! dumb it all down! moaarrr dumber!!" crowd. Ripping out power user functionality, removing configurability, and generally making it about as annoying to use for proficient users as possible.
There aren't many "real" desktops left. KDE is left. Some like it, some don't, but at least it hasn't dumbed itself down to placate the LCD who think computers shouldn't be any more complex than operating a toaster. Win7 is alright. Most of the others have gone off the deep end in their quest to satisfy people who need the most simplistic interface possible at the expense of power features and customization.
I switched from GNOME to KDE because of GNOME 3.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
People love complaining about Gnome Shell. I'm sure that the number of people that have been converted to Linux because of Gnome Shell greatly outnumber the gnome/start menu diehards from the 1990. What is actually preventing you from using Gnome Shell with a mouse? I do it everyday on 2 computers and 4 screens. Controls are logical and the default settings customise the desktop to you - virtual desktops are created automatically, you can drag and drop windows between desktops in the windows screen, and so on. Animations are smooth and the whole design works around the lack of support for minimized composite windows in X.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
...until Netcraft confirms it.
Yeah... MATE is GNOME now, far as I'm concerned.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
...and I like it.
TFA seems to be describing a mature software project that has entered maintenance mode. Why would this be a bad thing?
TFA says, "Distros are dropping GNOME for other environments instead of working with GNOME," with "other" and "environments" hyperlinked to Unity and Cinnamon. Actually, aren't these projects that share a ton of code with GNOME? So what's the problem? Users have a bunch of different choices. The developers offering these choices are sharing code. Users who prefer something outside this family of choices, such as KDE or Fluxbox or XFCE, can also do their own thing. This is also good. All the same apps run just fine in all these different environments. This is also good.
TFA says, "The claimed target users for GNOME are leaving desktop computers behind for types of devices GNOME doesn't work on," with hyperlinks referring to smartphones and tablet computers. Again, I don't see the problem. Users have other choices besides keyboard-and-mouse computers. I kind of doubt that anyone is choosing to use a smartphone to write their novel, so maybe users are actually using the correct tool for the correct job: desktops for the jobs that desktops are good for, smartphones for the jobs that smartphones are good for. Once again, what's the problem?
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I recently deployed a Debian Testing system and I didn't like GNOME 3. (it reminded me of KDE 4.0's initial release several years ago when everything was glitchy and barely functional) GNOME3 might eventually develop into something usable like KDE 4 did, but it just needs more time and a lot more polish.
If you want to keep using GNOME2, I suggest using MATE. It's basically a renamed GNOME2 fork.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
GNOME 3 missed the point of being a desktop environment which is to act like its supposed to and not get in the way of the user. The users of GNOME don't like GNOME 3, but the developers think that they somehow know better than the users of their product, naturally this lead to many users abandoning GNOME and forking it in projects like MATE.
GNOME was badly managed for years, but it was tolerable until GNOME 3.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well I use something calle Unity, not this "GNOME" of which you speak. Desktops have always been on shifting sands, but I'm pretty sure we're not about to plunge back into Winidows 3.x.
I switched to Xfce (on Fedora) without even trying Gnome 3. Just the description of what it was going to be like was enough to drive me away. My sister uses Ubuntu. After about a year trying to learn how to like Unity (Ubuntu's version of Gnome 3) she asked me to help her migrate to Xfce because it doesn't keep getting in her way and making it hard for her to do things.
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Because it tried to fix something that wasn't broken. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Gnome Panel for mouse and keyboard. Sure, GNOME shell might be nice if you've got a 10 inch touchscreen, but it gets in the way if you use a keyboard or mouse.
Don't "fix" what is broken, especially when it is a basic part of the system.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm feeding a troll, but here are the few no go's I have personally ran in to. The lack of configuration options are enough by themself but these are functionality that is lost. Over and under dual monitors doesn't work, such as a laptop panel as the primary lower and secondary monitor above. No go.. can't move apps through the ENFORCED top bar. Static IP addresses can't be done with the gui with default software. When trying to add Network printers from the gui, it doesn't allow you to see properties for each printer until AFTER it has been added, so no way from the gui to tell which printer is which in the list if you have multiple printers of the same model on the same network. You have to use the CUPS web interface. The old gnome 2 printer additions dialogs and wizards were just fine. The programmers are idiot control freaks..... their way or the highway.. at least cinnamon restores some level of sanity to the gnome 3 desktop.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I never quite understood the attraction. What exactly is this whole GNOME or KDE package for? Granted, there are some decent programs that came with them, but do they really require all the extra baggage of 10 layers of crappy libraries with fancy names? Both KDE and GNOME are just pointless empire building exercises by bunch of people who want to force their way of computer interaction on everyone else.
The OS should do one thing, provide services to programs. On UI level that includes managing windows and provide some way of task switching. Widget library is nice too since it saves some time for programmers, but it doesn't really have to be part of OS. On Windows this functionality is pretty much built in to the point of being (almost) non replaceable. Thankfully on Unix one has a choice of window manager, task switchers/panels, widget libraries etc. The users should be able to mix and match them to fulfill their needs. Some distros like Ubuntu may make these choices for the users that do not care much what they use. Where do mega projects "we gonna takeover your computer and make you do things our way" like GNOME and KDE fit? Nowhere, and finally people realize that.
The only thing that can be done with these projects is to salvage any good apps they have created and make them into independent projects. There is less and less to salvage though because GNOME managed to create dumber and dumber versions of the same things (like image viewers or browsers or file managers etc).
For instance, why would anyone ever use web browsers that GNOME has created (is the latest one Epiphany or something?) when there is Firefox, Chrome or Seamonkey made by people who know what they are doing?
There are some nice projects like LXDE, and to lesser degree XFCE which are actually helpful, they put together bunch of tools, most of them optional, and give you quite a lot of choice. Although XFCE is getting fatter and fatter.
Everybody was all up in arms with Ubuntu went with Unity. It was a head scratcher for a lot of folks unless you think about it from their point of view. The desktop is arguably the most important part - if users don't like it, that's it baby game over. Now imagine putting your whole product's future in the hands of Gnome or KDE. Those teams are like herds of ADHD children running amok with knives. KDE and Gnome had a decade to get their act together, they missed the boat on a Windows CE epic scale.
When some of my classmates who have never touched another OS ask me for a recommendation on a Linux distro, I've always recommended Xubuntu ever since Unity came. XFCE is just very useable and customize.
The one thing I like on gnome 3 is pushing the mouse cursor up in the upper left and getting a choice of windows. But other than that, it makes things harder.
I tried for a while to find a way to have a CPU and Network monitor like you could have it docked on a panel in gnome 2 but finally gave up.
I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open.
For vitual desktops, I personally prefer a fixed layout... email and web browser in upper left, work vitrual computer in lower left, etc. The ever-changing dynamic list doesn't work well for me.
The worst is that I can't get it to behave right with my laptop and external monitor. Laptops today come with shitty short screens, so when I work at home, I keep the lid closed and just use my external monitor. Gnome3 can't seem to grasp this and always assumes the laptop's monitor is the primary monitor, so I can't reach the widgets, menus, etc. Sure, I can muck with the display settings to fix it during a session, but I have to do it all over again if I reboot or need to open the lid for some reason.
For me, it just has an illogical way of doing things and completely breaks my work flow.
I've used a lot of linux variants over the years, but I don't really enjoy having to keep figuring out all the obscure ways to get it work right again... over and over.
Gnome 1.4 was pretty good.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I am quite liking Mate and can say it's a helluva lot better than Gnome3; it's basically Gnome2, which is why I'm using it. Maybe the Gnome3 crowd would have been more successful in North Korea, or some Japanese underground fetish club, with Unity wiggling about on stage. If Gnome3 had a voice, it would sound like an angry high-pitched Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anyway, suicide is almost always depressing to witness, but in this case, I wish them expedience and success.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
You know, I felt the same way a year ago. I still wish it was more tweakable, but the extensions are helping. I am much faster at getting around my desktop in Gnome-Shell than I am with Gnome2. Reason being is I can do more with just the keyboard.
I was a big Gnome-Do user. That's pretty much built-in now. I don't have to touch my mouse to move around apps. Their Alt+Tab feature is pretty slick. It shows Chromium and Alt+~ moves through the multiple instances I have open (OK so I don't usually have more than one thanks to tabs, but as an example...)
It's a bigger resource hog, but I have 12GB of RAM in the box I run it on. It doesn't feel that polished, but I really have few serious problems.
What they should be doing is focusing on the extensions paradigm. Let people create extensions to turn it into whatever type of system they want. If you want a traditional taskbar, get an extension. Distros could apply whatever extensions they want to create varying types of "Gnome". That would give them some direction that they say the project has lost.
No sig for you!!
The day that Miguel abandoned it and handed the reins to Havoc was the day the music died. That was the start of a downward spiral that never ended. What was the users' DE became Czar Havoc's DE. Shortly thereafter I switched to XFCE and never looked back.
Gnome is one of those things where everybody can clearly point at the exact moment it became a fucking mess.
Gnome 3 turned me into a KDE user. KDE has it's own problems, but not like Gnome.
GNOME 3 represents the kind of "I'm not going to listen to the users" once displayed by XFree86. But there are other problems as well. Recently I have come to realize that there is a problem that few have noticed.
Imagine an application and an OS sharing the same libraries... not unusual in some instances, but I have come to realize that I can't run GiMP 2.8.0 on CentOS 6.x because the GTK and related libraries and dependencies are so connected with GNOME that all of GNOME needs to be upgraded in order to be able to run the application! While that's not 100% true in that I was able to compile all the needed libraries in /opt/gnome-2.8, the resulting compiled code doesn't integrate well with my existing GNOME 2.x desktop. It's frustrating and annoying. The operating environment shouldn't be such that it conflicts with applications. Someone wasn't paying attention to certain unexpected consequences. So here I sit with Windows having better support for GiMP than a current Linux distribution. Sad and pathetic.
GNOME is breaking my heart with all of this. I was quite loyal to its use but damn... GNOME3, then Unity? People have made it clear they don't want this. They keep going as if by forcing it down our thoats, we will learn to accept it. The missing ingredient here is CRITICAL MASS. Critical mass is the main ingredient in Microsoft's disgusting recipe. We all hate it but we eat it because there's nothing else. GNOME doesn't have that ingredient. Whatever they are trying to do isn't going to work and will result in their becoming another failed project... another lesson learned in failed Linux projects.
I've pretty much always used KDE (or fluxbox / i3 depending on what I'm doing), and have never liked Gnome. However the prospect of Gnome's death troubles me. We can't say for sure the software we use now isn't going to go in some assinine direction. If KDE completely screws up next, then where do us KDE users go for an equivalent desktop? Xfce and other options exist, but it's always been KDE and Gnome as the full featured options.I think the real health of either project depends on the strength of the other, and not having all the eggs in one basket is a good thing in open source.
I'm hopeful Gnome won't die, but if it gets to that point I hope it'll be forked so we can move on. And I hope it'll be so awesome that I'll switch from KDE :)
I have two suggestions for people when it come to those. Lower level people get LXDE and higher level get Xfce. Personally, I flip between which I like more. LXDE has more windows-like UI features, which makes going between the two easier; Xfce always seems to follow what I want, rather than fighting it or figuring out how it wants me to do it.
I use Gnome 3.4 every day and would never go back to the old ways. Extension are a terrific idea and there is plenty of development in that area. The future of the desktop is as a seamless connection to the Internet, so that local apps and online apps are both available as if they are all installed locally. Queue the naysayers who will go on about what happens when you do not have a connection. That is why Gnome can be a mixture of local and remote. You can stay stuck in the past with Mate, or move into the future. It does not bother me if you stay stuck in the past, but I look forward to the next generation of Gnome, and the one after that. Lastly, there would not be a Unity or a Cinnamon without Gnome. Both are merely alternate shells to Gnome 3.x. But that is the strength of the new Gnome, you can make alternate shells.
No we don't, or at least, I certainly don't! I have Xfce configured to use one panel, on the bottom because I find two to be a waste of screen real estate. Yes, I have ample room on my monitor, especially with four workspaces, but I'm old-school enough to believe that the old maxim "wast not, want not" still applies.
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Worst is Firefox and Thunderbird. Why cannot they obey X session? Why cannot they start up in the desktop I would like them to (Ileft them when I restarted).
WHY CANNOT LINUX DESTOP STARTUP AUTOMATICALLY AS I WANT IT? Why is everything randomly placed? I used quite a lot of time putting certain programs to certain desktops. But no, some asshole thinks s/he "knows better".
Gnome 3.0 had me trying out various tiling window managers to get rid of the horrible Shell.
Gnome 3.2 came out and I went back to the Shell. I needed a ton of extensions to get a usable desktop.
Now, with 3.4, all I need to add is a direct shortcut to each desktop. Alas, the GUI offers me shortcuts only for the first four desktops, but at least it is possible to set shortcuts for all of them on the command line. I no longer have any extensions installed. Super + typing part of the application name is wonderful.
All in all, 3.4 is IMHO nicer than Gnome 2. The road to get there has been horrendous and it may have cost too many users and developers for Gnome to be viable in the future. I hope Gnome will survive, because it is the best desktop I have tried so far.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I know that I "unfriended" you a while ago but I have to say that I would give this rant +5000 insightful. Maybe I need to get off your lawn.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I wrote a couple of major apps under Gnome/Gtk 1 and put them up on Sourceforge. I packaged them for RH7 and Ubuntu 6.
Gnome 2 came out, breaking both binary AND source compatibility. The new interfaces were baroque and I just didn't have the time to learn them.
Ubuntu 8 renamed a key package and now my Ubuntu 6 .deb files no longer installed.
Ubuntu 9 dropped support for Gnome/Gtk 1 completely.
The only question that remains now is: port to QT or go the whole nine yards and port the app to Java/Swing?
I realize that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but please turn me on to your weed supplier because you are smoking some really good stuff. I wish I was hallucinating like that.
PREACH IT BROTHER!
I was a 4 year user of linux (RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Centos, Mandriva, and Yellow Dog off the top of my head) until Gnome 3 came along. Then the configuration became a chore every time I wanted to use my home computer. Then I switched jobs into a position which forces Win7 use. Then I wanted to play Borderlands with a few friends of mine. Then I was/am writing a dissertation across the library/home/work/school/travel computers and need EndNote and Word to work.
My computer still dual-boots, but it has been over 9 months since I've booted to Linux.
I was using Linux when it easy, and wasn't getting in the way. Now I use Windows 7 for the same reason. I will happily switch in the event that things reverse themselves again.
Sadly, Unity is even more frustrating and XFCE is still very rudimentary.
CAN I PLEASE HAVE KDE2 or GNOME2 back??
KDE, or Kwin to be more accurate, would allow you to do that and more. It's their killer feature for me.
Gnome3 is good for the people who replace their PC with a tablet because it's easier. Some sources would have it that there's lots of those people. Getting them to contribute code could be a challenge, though.
Linux Mint Mate Edition or Linux Mint Cinnamon
Well I run Gnome 3 on my Fedora 17 box and Cinnamon 1.4 on my Mint 13 box. Both desktops are new and there are a few rough edges, but I enjoy using both. Remember, we are Linux guys (and gals), we are supposed to work around the edges, tweak stuff, and stuff, goes with the territory ..:P
My two bits
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
Because GNOME has always been about being against something rather than for something. That kind of unfocused institutional angst is difficult to sustain.
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
Democrat delenda est
Extensions now fix the network/cpu monitor (I really missed if as well), the open new vs. brig old window up, and lots of other things. I think they've fixed the multiple monitor support as well, but I haven't done that for a while. It is kind of sad that all these changes do is bring back things we had with Gnome/Gnome-Do for ages without adding much that is good. I'm still trying to get Evolution or Thunderbird to display *visible* persistent notifications. How could they think that I want to hover my mouse over the bottom panel to see if I have any new messages ... why not just bring up the damn application? Even Unity gets that certain notifications should be in you face as their things you are immediately interested in at a glance. Of course, Unity with their 'global menu' silliness and poor performance has even more serious problems.
I like the gnome shell (and I was previously a gnome 2 user). It was originally (years ago) very buggy and flaky, but now it works quite well, and is actually very nice ... nicer, I think, than the er, "classic" style panel. It keeps out of my way more, and is easier and quicker to use when I need it.
People are often quite conservative when it comes to a familiar environment, and will react negatively to any change, and I think regardless of any merits, it was inevitable that there would be a lot of moaning about a change as drastic as you see in gnome 3. On the other hand, it's really quite nice to see somebody actually trying out new ideas instead of just blindly sticking with the same creaky old stuff, which was hardly perfect, even if it had the benefit of familiarity.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I can't for the life of me figure out how you must be using Gnome 3.
You certainly can you move your cursor to other windows to click on them, give them focus and raise them. Heck you can even do focus follows mouse, and autoraise, getting rid of the click.
Secondly, you don't have to click the word "Activities" at all. It's a hot corner. You're supposed shoot your mouse to it quickly. And the beauty of the hot corner is, you don't have to look for it or locate it on the screen, you don't have to aim for it or click it - you just whip your cursor up to it in a fast, imprecise motion - and voila - you have the overview. The targets there are also large, so you can don't have to be precise.
Or you can leave your left hand on the keyboard to hit the super-key...
New stuff is find. New stuff is great. New stuff is not the problem.
Throwing away or breaking the old stuff is the problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Thank you.
I haven't written a bash script in ages and just with all the things I have going on, I haven't had time to come up with a script like yours. I did a simple one that uses xrandr to force back to a 1920x1080 mode, but I had no idea how to check to see if it's docked (though my laptop isn't docked to a docking station - I just keep the lid closed with a usb keyboard and mouse). I'll give your script a try.
I agree, the strength of linux is its flexibility -- if you know where to tweak. But sometimes figuring that out is non-trivial and I just don't have the free time I used to have.
Thank you, again, for sharing your script. I've been settling for systems that mostly work the way I want... this gives me the ability to force the ones that I might like better to work for me.
It was Gnome that convinced me to jump over to Linux once I'd decided to abandon Windows completely. I'd looked at OS/X but I couldn't make head nor tail of it, everything was awkward on the Mac. Gnome 2 with all the eye candy working was a thing of beauty and everythiing either just worked or could be got to work with a quick web search - I can't believe I'm writing that about Linux but there it is.
It was Unity that pushed me away from Ubuntu, and Gnome 3 that pushed me away from Gnome. KDE is not easy and it's not logical but I've come to love it and it has grown up. Yesterday I plugged two monitors of different resolutions into a KDE machine and they just worked with no dead zone and wallpapers all fixed up for the new resolutions. That would not have happened even a year ago.
I'm installing Linux on a computer for a newbie this weekend and where once I would have put Gnome on it I am now putting Lubuntu onto it instead. If Gnome is staring into the abyss it is because it chose to - a lemming intent on its own demise. Ave atque vale, Gnome.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
I too am in a world where I there are things I HAVE to do in Windows, but I really prefer working in a Linux environment (especially when I find one I really like).
I used to dual-boot as well, but after a harddrive crash a couple years ago, I re-evaluated my set up and discovered VirtualBox. Virtualization had come a long way since I had last checked. So now I run strictly in Linux and have VBox virtual computers to run Windows XP and Windows 7 in as needed. I even managed to take an old work laptop and virtualized an image of its harddrive so I no longer have to carry a computer back and forth for work.
The nice thing with the virtual computing is you can easily back up the whole computer by just copying the virtual hard disk somewhere. You can also set up your windows working environment on another computer by just coping the virtual harddrive file and making a new virtual computer there.
VirtualBox also has pretty decent integration with the host computer (you can map directories on the host as drives on the guest) so it makes things pretty seamless. It's also the only way I can use my canon scanner, since there are no Linux drivers that work for it... and the same with my old Creative Zen mp3 player and iPod.
It might be worth looking into when you get a break from your dissertation.
I'm going back to grad school as well and since I'll be taking transit and biking, I got a netbook for my work at school. I tried Linux Mint on it and it's been a real pleasure to use... very few complaints, and I think those are more of an Acer issue than a Linux one. I don't dual boot on my home computer, but I did set up the netbook to dual boot into Windows 7... in case I really needed a native Windows 7, but I haven't needed it so far.
I just not as young and carefree as I used to be. Like you, I don't have as much time to trick-out my computer to get it just so... I just want it to work reliably.
If you aren't using a dock you just need to find something else that does change. For example you might have luck looking in /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID. Failing that just look for the presence of your external keyboard, pointer (lsusb) or display (xrandr). Once you can detect the states you need to react to the rest is pretty easy.
Notice I have the extra flip to 1024x768 for two seconds, that was trial and error when I found some versions of GNOME had problems in the past resizing from the internal to the external display under certain conditions I never bothered fully understanding. The panel at the bottom would get lost and that going really small and back up made it work. It is just a workaround, you can probably drop those two lines.
Democrat delenda est
I used and liked and was deeply invested in GNOME 2. And I was active in submitting bug reports, etc. (The same for KDE 3 before that, until they tossed it all for KDE 4).
If they had just fixed the bugs (or even if they hadn't) I'd still be using either KDE 3 or GNOME 2.
But tossing everything out, pressing rewind, and then starting over?
In 2010, I expected more from my computer system than "cool hacks are being pieced together to someday lead to a fully integrated desktop environment and maybe even an environment API!"
By 2000, ten years earlier, we were already well into the era of "if you want me to use it, it had better not be beta or experimental and bad for my workflow."
Full-on GUI experimentation and beta-level stability in a production desktop system is so 1991 it's laughable. I felt like I was back in the days of people circulating TWM patches.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The problems at Gnome are common across much of GNU/Linux these days. I tried as hard as I could, yet failed to get Gnome GTK+ guys to accept (or offer an alternative) an accessibility patch fairly critical to the blind community (allowing icons to have verbal descriptions). It's possible to work with the Debian guys, but unless one of their inner circle is interested in your specific project, you've got no way to reach all the Debian users who want to use what you have to offer. This is partly why Google has 600K apps and Debian has 30K packages. If I want to reach Android geeks, I can be published by next week, and the only real challenge is being noticed among those other 600K apps.
What Linux needs is a rewrite of dpkg, just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion. This concept of upstream golden source is BS. What we need is distributed git-style repositories, where users can easily point their machines to the upstream branch/fork of their choice. That way, if I'm in my favorite distro and I hate this new desktop manager, I just point to the branch/fork maintained by people I consider more sensible. Machines shouldn't be GNU/Linux boxes. They should be bare metal Linux boxes, and groups like Ubuntu should just be famous repository managers who get so much right for most users, that lazy geeks like me put them first in my list of distributed repositories. But when Fedora has a better package, or a better version, I should be free to pull that specific part from them, and have it work with all the stuff I pull from Ubuntu.
NOT impossible. Only pie in the sky because of the lack of will to move forward in the calcified GNU/Linux community.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Umm, that's all already the case.
You just run your own PPA or apt repository if you don't want to play by the distro's rules about getting into their repos. Then if people want your software they can add it. And it is incredibly easy through the various frontends or by editing sources.list directly.
Google do this for chrome, debian-multimedia for this for their extra codec offerings, skype have a debian repo.
It's not pie in the sky, the only barrier to this is your own incompetence and ignorance, which you seem quite intent on displaying here.
I guess my suggestion that the current system is screwed up didn't make you happy. Well, it's screwed up, and I'm sorry about hurting feelings.
The PPA system is great. I used it extensively. It's a bandaid, not a solution. If I want to pull my upstream Gnome packages from a fork of Gnome, good luck making that work with existing pre-compiled Ubuntu binaries. It's simply not possible, not with a custom PPA and a month of compiling 100 custom packages (which no one will be crazy enough to use, because they just want your Gnome hacks, not a new distro), and certainly not with editing your sources.list. The problems are fundamental design decisions made in the early 90's, which were made well for the time, but now are destroying the GNU/Linux community.
The reason this is pie in the sky is guys like you will bury the message, and most people will never understand the problem, or the potential solution. Dpkg is subversion. We need git.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
What you seem to want really isn't posible. You can't just mix and match in one part of a major subsystem and you certainly can't mix Debian and Fedora packages beyond the very end user applications that have no connections into the different plumbing that seperates the two trees of development and that basically static link everything.
You seem enamoured with the Android package system without undertanding it. Android packages work because they are very restricted in what they can do. For example, they must be Java; that means they cannot alter any of the system level components. So replacing part of GNOME would be like replacing the native binary parts of Android, which an .apk can't attempt. They also work because there is only one Android line and it is carefully kept backward compatible. While Linux distros can upgrade from one major version to another entirely via the package system you could never upgrade from Android 2.2 to 2.3 via the Play Store. The OS components involved simply aren't part of the package manager on Android. The kernel on most devices isn't even in a file.
Every few weeks some kid shows up on a Linux forum demanding that we rebuild everything to support a binary only cross distro 'app' model. Usually with notes about how much more successful Windows or OS X is and attributing that success to this binary model. Not happening. The reason we have different distros is because they aren't all alike except for the package manager, each is trying new things. If a consensus emerges that one has really done something right the others of course adopt it but there is no central planner and we don't want one. Good luck convincing a Gentoo ricer to adopt binary packaging and a strict binary API. Systemd or sysV init? PulseAudio, ALSA, ESD, ARTS or OSS?
Feel free to create yet another distro and show us all how it should be done, that is of course where the existing ones came from. And maybe you will succeed in attracting a following and eventually some of your ideas will migrate.
Democrat delenda est
So why use a GUI?
Because, like GUIs, non sequiturs can be informative, right up 'till when the goldfish die.
I switched to Xfce (on Fedora) without even trying Gnome 3.
I switched to a fork of Gnome 3 that works and looks beautiful. Isn't it great when open source helps us users the way it's supposed to?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere
False. GNOME 2 was most certainly better than GNOME 3, and the metric used to measure quality is number of "what the fuck"s, "how the fuck"s, and "why the fuck"s per hour (lower is better).
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
This slashdot thread is about a major problem which by itself is a major blow to Linux. Obviously, you think everything is just fine, and always will be. If my tone sounds harsh, it's not you, its just the hordes of clones like you that in the end will insure no real change happens that saddens me.
GNU/Linux true believers are incapable of seeing that GNU/Linux is dying, so we should probably not try to talk rationally about it. I've put an insane number of hours into open source GNU/Linux stuff, so seeing it failing hurts me personally. Debian-multimedia? Really? So... you're going to switch your Gnome desktop like Linus wants to, perhaps you will use debian-multimedia to install the latest and greatest Gnome fork, Cinnamon? No, you wont, because it's not possible, but I wont be able to convince you that you couldn't trivially use debian-multimedia to do it. Math like Android's 600K packages vs Debian's 30K packages mean nothing to you. 590K of them are total crap, right? One week to publish to millions of users in Windows or Android versus years in Debian are a mere annoyance, and you prefer the exceptional quality control in Debian on those 30K packages, to any 600K repository of crap. If software authors object to having to rewrite every package for every distro, and having to negotiate with each distro separately for a package to be accepted, it's their problem, right? The top games aren't available on Linux because of the stupidity of the game industry, right?
GNU/Linux is dying, and as much as I'd like to help fix that, true believers in the ancient ways vastly outnumber those of us with enough software design sense to see that GNU/Linux has to change. The year of Linux on the desktop is 2013! Ignore the nay-sayers like me. We're ignorant morons. A million lines of production code I wrote currently in use by customers around the world contributed nothing to my understanding of anything. Hacking Vinux, speech DSP algorithms, and text-to-speech are child's play (the stuff I do for free to benefit GNU/Linx). It's only for the stupid. 26 years of building software, 22 patents, tech lead at one company that went IPO, early contributor to another IPO, and founder of yet another company I sold last year just means I have no clue. Guys like us are simply ignorant, and will be ignored by the vast majority of true believers. That's why Linux is dying.
With a redesign of the package managers to work as a peer-to-peer distributed repository system built on a web of trust, with the pre-compiled binaries you need to run your system the way you want to, GNU/Linux could be the next big thing (or at least bigger than now). It's actually quite involved and given how well you're picking up the whole "git" rewrite of "dpkg", I'll just assume you're not getting it. Actually, you're probably super smart, but simply refuse to believe that the existing GNU/Linux system is not already delivering anything I could possibly be talking about.
This fracturing of the tiny Linux market into Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc and Gnome2/Gnome3/Unity/Cinnamon is just healthy growing pains, right? All this choice is a good thing, and your switching to KDE is just part of what makes GNU/Linxu so great! Gosh I'm glad I get good quality packages from this vibrant innovative community!
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Want to open something? Press the Win key, type a name, press enter. Viola - I now have (Insert application here) looking at me.
Well, we're all very happy for you that you either use so few applications or have a steel-trap memory enabling you to remember the names of all the programs you've installed.
There's something to be said for discoverability. But hey, we wouldn't want to clutter your dedicated clock bar.
You talk like there was one "Linux community" with one opinion on this matter. The Ubuntu guys may have had techical/interface design problems but they clearly set out to achieve what you are talking about and are still aiming for an easy to use desktop system. You should be able to find a community where your wants fit in. The question then is: how would you achieve that tecnically in a volunteer project?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2.
That's not true, and I'll prove it: GNOME 2 worked and was okay, and GNOME 3 is a huge pile of stinky crap. Gnome 3 is worse than GNOME 2. I feel I am qualified to answer this because I try every new DE I can find time for and put them through their paces on multiple hardware setups. GNOME 2 was tops on my list because I liked that it worked reliably and predictably and mae sense in how it operates. KDE still looks nicer but is a pain to use, for me, though it is mostly okay. XFCE, Enlightenment, and LXDE have all had decent versions as well. It pains me to say it, but GNOME 3 is not just a big change, but is very, very bad as well.
Between GNOME 3 being a stinker and the GNOME Project struggling for direction, I don't know which is the cause and which is the effect, but the two facts seem to be tightly linked.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
And I agree with you but there are still things that suck about how Gnome 3 does things (and I'm using it right now).
In Gnome-Do, as well as Launchy, Kupfer and every other Quicksilver clone, you can navigate search results with the down key. And so it is in Gnome 3, except the results are displayed horizontally.
This means that you use the down key to move rightward and the up key to move leftward.
I like Gnome 3, I don't think it is as bad as many people have claimed. I see a lot of potential. But GODS IT IS BONE HEADED about so many things. So many things implemented so wrong.
But... the future refused to change.
Gnome 2 was fine. It really needed very little work beyond bug fixing. The problem was that the Gnome developers wanted something to do and continue to make a name for themselves, and so they tried to come up with the next great thing. Microsoft has been doing the same thing, although for different reasons. The attempt at forcing a switch to a new desktop by fiat is exactly the kind of b.s. we are getting from commercial companies.
My suggestion? Make Gnome Classic the default, split Gnome 3 into a separate project and give it a different name, and make it crystal clear that it is users, not developers, who decide which one they want to use and which one will win in the market.
While you are at it, also make Gnome less monolithic and more respectful of standards (same for other desktops). Right now, running any Linux desktop is more of an all-or-nothing proposition, where any one application starts up a whole lot of infrastructure in the background. Fixing that should be high priority so that users can pick and choose what components they want to built their desktop out of.
>>> What is actually preventing you from using Gnome Shell with a mouse? >>>
I want my rightclick back...
This is the reason why I switched to KDE from Gnome back around '05.
Gnome and its related applications presume to know how best to use an application, regardless of peoples' varying workflows and, by extension, their preferred configuration.
To sum up my experiences with Gnome:
1) Find something that doesn't act how you want it to
2) Open configuration menu for that particular application / OS function
3) Find out that the configuration menu only has one checkbox, and it's not for the feature you want to change.
4) Ragequit
Conversely, of course, KDE is more along the lines of:
1) Find something that doesn't act how you want it to
2) Open configuration menu for that particular application / OS function
3) Tab through multiple pages of options until you find what you want
4) Celebrate
Honestly, I'd rather have to wade through 100 pages of configuration options to find what i want than to not be able to find it at all. That said, there are some Gnome apps that have 100,000 options, and some equivalent KDE apps that have 1 or 2; however, I'm speaking more to the overall design ideology of the Gnome system.
On a side note, I'm amazed that there is actual honest discourse going on in this thread. Why, even just a few years ago, one couldn't shout "Gnome!" or "KDE!" without starting an all-out flamewar. This thread seems, in comparison, fairly civil.
This slashdot thread is about a major problem which by itself is a major blow to Linux.
Actually, getting free of the Gnome mafia so great projects like KDE can prosper will be a major boost for Linux. Gnome is so awful I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft isn't funding it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'm gonna try to lay it out as simply as possible:
1. I want to choose where any panels/docks/whatevers go. That means I can put them on the top, bottom, left, right, middle, corners, anywhere I can think of to put it. All right, I admit, maybe the middle or corners are not such a great idea, but how else am I supposed to be hyperbolic in this case?
2. I want to be able to hide those panels/docks/whatevers whenever I deem them to be unnecessary. This means file menus can be integrated into them or not, a simple checkbox in appearance settings would probably do the trick for each of those.
3. I want to be able also to control where the file menus and title bars for my windows appear, for example, being able to put them on the left, right, or bottom if I wish, I'm sick of this title bar on top crap that persists into my (mostly) widescreen world. Vertical space is expensive, horizontal space is cheap!
4. I should be able to decide where the close/maximize/minimize buttons appear as well; if I choose to have my title bars on the left (for example) I should be able to put those buttons on the top or bottom of the bar. The middle of the bar would probably be silly, but I'll be damned if there aren't times I feel like being silly.
5. Effects like transparency should always be available. I want things to hide even when they're in plain sight.
6. I would like to see non-linear menus/panels/docks/whatevers (why are they always like a box? why not a circle, or a triangle or any of the other myriad shapes that can easily be produced with today's graphics cards?) because I am sick of looking at boxes all day. This would be especially awesome for corner panels/docks/whatevers, where menus and whatnot could sort of bubble out.
Is all of that really so much to ask? Are those things available already in some great DM that I haven't tried yet? I just want a desktop where I can control the things that I consider basic, and let's face it, nothing on my list is really all that complex (except maybe the last one?).
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure). Now doing that would be bad in general, but if you instead run chrooted in a jail, like recently has been done in Ubuntu, and use hard-links to share the various .so files, you can get disk utilization under control. In my experience, .so files don't fill up much disk anyway, so if I have 2 or 3 versions of most .so files, shared across the various apps that use them, it should not be a big problem.
You, sir, are an idiot.
$100K software is distributed that way because developers can't allow external maintainers touch their source code, and are unwilling to do distribution-specific builds themselves. Their "special" libraries crowd up memory because they are not shared with the rest of the system -- you end up with two copies Qt, two copies of MySQL client, two JREs, and dreaded two libstdc++'es that caused so much grief in 90's. They often use obsolete protocols and don't work properly with other components -- what is usually just fine for EDA or CAD program, but stupid for anything else.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You can't just mix and match in one part of a major subsystem and you certainly can't mix Debian and Fedora packages beyond the very end user applications that have no connections into the different plumbing that seperates the two trees of development and that basically static link everything.
That's a symptom not a cause. Of course when every packages just barfs all over /usr/ and spreads itself everywhere you can't just install another package of the same name and not expect things to explode. But that's a problem of inflexible namespace management and nothing else.
Every few weeks some kid shows up on a Linux forum demanding that we rebuild everything to support a binary only cross distro 'app' model.
Yeah, and guess what, that kid is right, maybe not in the way it should be implemented, but in the features the system should provide.
The reason we have different distros is because they aren't all alike except for the package manager,
Distros are like 99% alike, because they all run all the same software, just in slightly different incompatible ways. It's an idiotic duplication of work that we should get rid of, not celebrate.
I think what you need for this to really work is two fundamental changes. First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.
Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages. The Perl community has CPAN ( Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and the command line tool 'cpan' that facilitates downloading and installing a CPAN Perl module and all of its dependencies. Ruby and Python have something similar with Ruby gems and Python easy_install. Java does the same with Maven or with Ant + Ivy or SBT. Haskell has the 'cabal' tool to install Haskell modules with automatic dependency resolution from their Hackage repositories. What I presume would really help is if some people made dpkg (the Debian and Debian offspring package manager), rpm (the Red Hat package manager), or newer package managers like Conary or Nix to be fully aware of the various programming language package management tools.
I'll have it finished Tuesday.
all "Linux" is GNU/Linux. bare metal Linux would be just a kernel. GNU is the Operating System that runs on the Linux Kernel. you can swap the kernel out and get other combos, like Debians GNU/FreeBSD distro. I do agree that Linux should be a bit more genericised, but then the main distros loose the manageability they provide now. the compatibility checks that they all do on their internal code bases. as for patches and updates, most of them will float the changes all the way to the root of the application they are fixing, but have the ability to patch it in their spin of it faster.
Dear remaining GNOME devs,
You guys said “If you don’t like GNOME 3, don’t use it.”
So we took you at your word.
The CADT development model remains predominant in GNOME: throwing everything away and writing something new is always much more fun (and better for the resume) than just fixing the remaining bugs in something that basically works.
I'm a Unix sysadmin for a living. I just reinstalled my work box with Xubuntu 12.04. It's amazingly responsive and the interface doesn't make me want to set it on fucking fire. I can GET SHIT DONE AT WORK.
I didn’t leave GNOME, it left me.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
That's a rather interesting point that I hadn't thought of before...but not in the way you mean.
Look into genetics, specifically how genes emerge. Mammalian color vision (varies slightly between species that have it) if created by genes that doubles, and then evolved differently. I'm not sure that two copies of MySQL are useful. That's more like doubling a chromosome. But two copies of libstdc++ might, over time, evolve to handle different jobs. The key part, of course, is over time. Most such mutations are a loss, and so disappear over time, but some are the very stuff out of which evolution happens (well, strictly speaking the disappearance of the versions that don't work is also evolution in action).
Now if you look at bacteria, they usually have only one variant of any particular gene, even though they have a poor (compared to mammals) copying-fidelity when the DNA is duplicated. They is because in their lifestyle they MUST be efficient. These may be compared to embedded systems. So what should desktops be compared with? Nematodes? Plants? Each way of life imposes certain constraints on what will be successful. Similarly each systems environment imposes particular constraints. Often these days it isn't minimal amount of code, but closer to optimal performance, which can be quite different. Mobile platforms have another set of constraints.
Don't expect code to have evolved into anything approaching optimal in the short period of time it's been being built. And don't expect the same code to be optimal for wildly different environments. Sometimes it happens, and that's very good. Quicksort is hard to improve on no matter what your environment. But such things aren't to be expected, though they are, of course, to be hoped for. But consider the way hash-tables have been moving in on the space originally occupied by AVL-trees. The replacement can look radically different (and because of that difference, there can be places where the original maintains dominance, say if you want to retreive a sorted list of keys).
OTOH, Gnome appears to me to be dying. I wish they same thing weren't happening to KDE. For my purposes KDE3 was the best desktop Linux ever came up with. Gnome2 was a reasonable replacement. But neither KDE4 nor Gnome3 is even usable. (So I'm disagreeing with the original blurb. I *can* say that Gnome3 is worse.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I am absolutely serious -- GNOME3 UI is worse than goatse.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If KDE4 weren't so terrible, I'd agree with you. Fortunately there are other choices. Unfortunately, they think the problem with Gnome and KDE is that they aren't lightweight. That's NOT the major problem. Not in my environment. The problem is that they are nigh unusable. KDE3 was the best desktop for usability that I've ever seen. It's not particularly lightweight. But I'll pick fwvm over KDE4 *or* Gnome3. It may be lightweight, but at least is't sort of usable. (Actually I'd probably pick something else, but I haven't decided on what, because I can still run Gnome2.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
However, you are not only polluting RAM with duplicate versions of code. You are also polluting L2 (and instruction L1, but that will probably be flushed anyway). No reason to make those context switches more expensive than what is really needed. And a large statically linked executable is in no way trivial to ignore, you can easily reach 10s of MBs.
But KDE 4.0 was crap, too. And with 4.2 they got it usable, with 4.4 or something like this it was better than 3.x. Why aren't the gnome guys achieving the same? Nothing against a clean restart, but then they need to recover from the total loss of features.
What Linux needs is a rewrite of dpkg, just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion.
Sounds like what we need is to convince Torvalds to rewrite dpkg. After all, he made the kernel, and now it's taken over everything; then he made git, and that's one of the most popular revision control systems now used (probably the most popular in OSS), so now he just needs to go for a hat trick and make a successor to dpkg/rpm.
Gnome is so awful I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft isn't funding it.
It's a fun conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's true, because Red Hat of all companies really is funding it and employing a bunch of their primary developers. So this really seems to be a good case for Napoleon's old adage, "never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".
How exactly is KDE4 unusable? Yes, the early versions really were unusable, but the recent versions (anything after 4.6) have been pretty decent. 4.8 is looking pretty good in fact.
You are right: "A UI is a type of interface, which is a "contract" for consistent interaction" /dev/null and start over.
The problem is that GNOME3 broke that contract more than any other UI until then, and in ways that made it harder and harder for professional Linux users to get their work done. GNOME 3 broke the contract of being useful for being cool or for being like some "UI designer" though everyone has to interact now.
I hope they just send the whole failed effort to
I really don't think I know what you're getting at as far as the number of steps involved.
If you're complaining about the multi-part K-menu, this is easily fixed: just revert to the KDE3-style menu. It's easy: all you have to do is right-click on the K-menu icon, select "Switch to Classic Menu Style", and you now have your KDE3 menu back.
As for as a "noisy background", no one's forcing you to put any "plasmoids" on your desktop. You can remove them all easily, and just make it blank. And it's pretty easy to disable all animations too.