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GNOME Developers Lay Out Plans for GNOME OS
From the H: "Allan Day has written a blog post on the concrete plans for 'GNOME OS' and provided background on the ideas that have motivated those plans ... Day starts by emphasizing that GNOME OS is not an attempt to replace existing distributions. Although the creation of a standalone GNOME OS is part of the plans, the idea is to make that a testing and development platform, and any improvements that come from GNOME OS should 'directly improve what the GNOME project is able to offer distributions.' Many of the drivers for GNOME OS are, Day says, old ideas to improve the development experience, such as automated testing and sandboxed applications, and while the developers could have separate initiatives for each feature, the idea is to work on them as a 'holistic plan' under the moniker 'GNOME OS.'"
A few slides provide more context. In the works are stabilizing the platform APIs, improving deployment of applications, making everything automatically testable, and probably the most controversial: "The increasing popularity of mobile and touch devices represents a challenge to existing desktop solutions. This situation is complicated by the emergence of new hybrid devices that combine keyboards, touchpads and touchscreens. During our discussions last week we talked about how existing types of devices – primarily laptops and desktops – have to remain the primary focus for GNOME ... At the same time, we also want to ensure that GNOME remains compatible with new hardware. ... We have set the goal of having a touch-compatible GNOME 3 within a maximum of 18 months." The drive toward touch may seem obnoxious to desktop users, but spreading Free Software to a hardware ecosystem that is currently locked down and proprietary seems like a good goal to have.
So a whole OS that is dumbed down so even a retard would find it frustrating to use?
Yeah, right. We're going to be interested in a Gnome OS, because the Gnome Desktop is *THAT* good.
Right? Right?
Hello? Is anyone listening...
Gnome needs to go quietly into the night. they have consistently ignored user feedback and are now confused as to why people are turning their back.
The GNOME Project got sued by
- Google for using a project name that could end in gOS
- Apple for using a name similar to iOS and round edged on icons
- ORACLE for using the letter O (Larry has a patent on beeing a rich asshole)
We have set the goal of having a touch-compatible GNOME 3 within a maximum of 18 months.
Who cares about touch-compatible, what I want to know is when their goal for a non-touch compatible GNOME is? You know, for those of us still using a keyboard and mouse?
*Not sure if being ironic or if that guy doesn't realize OSX is based on BSD.*
Honestly, I'm in the market for just a plain 1:1 ripoff of win7's interface. It's minimalistic, flows well and allows me to get shit done. That is all.
FTA: "...touch-compatible GNOME 3 within a maximum of 18 months...
WTF? I thought GNOME 3 was pretty much designed as a tablet GUI. It sure as hell wasn't designed with desktop users in mind. Are they suggesting they made those radical changes without thinking of touchscreens?
More reasons to go with Mate desktop (Gnome 2 fork).
Gnome has been providing a their own standardized user experience for some time now. It's good to see that their next step will be to replace the user with their own autonomous testing framework, at the very least that should reduce the public outcry for further changes to come. Next year, they will continue that effort by combining the legacy input devices with touch sense, so that touching the gui elements has the same effect as throwing your mouse against the screen. As a final step, they will sandbox their users to completely isolate them from the GUI, giving the designers full freedom without having to care about real-world usage.
I'm sure they'll complete their own kernel the year thereafter.
Can we just make CDE the dominant *nix desktop again like the good ol' days? I'd rather have that over GNOME 3
Has the Gnome project considered launching a mission to Mars?
This is a FSF project, is it not? Then why don't they start by completing Hurd, and then building whatever is needed to enable Gnome to run on it w/o X? Also, make Gnome GPL3, & use this as an opportunity to make an all GPL3 OS. Seriously, the FSF is all over the place w/ OSs, be it 'Libre-Linux', Hurd or now GnomeOS. Make up your minds, people!
Oe else, the other thing they could do here - include all the functionality of X/Wayland in Gnome3, along w/ liberated GPU drivers, so that Gnome can be directly installed on any Unix - be it Linux, BSD, Hurd, Minix, OpenIndiana or whatever. Even that's a better idea than building an OS from scratch
The mad dash toward the "one interface to rule them all" has given us nothing but a deepening dive into a universally cumbersome user interface. While few people converse with the same tone and measure with which they write, UI designers seem oblivious to the nuances that make a platform what it is.
Will developing an OS help Gnome get a handle on this problem? Or will the OS become a distraction, like Mono appears to have been?
And no use for anything that gets in the way of it.
Perhaps that is the future: Companies willing to build upon open standards and base software, but make it propritary and closed enough to build a business upon.
It's time they focused on non desktop environments because most of their development has been of a non desktop environment. Forcing that on desktop users has been a little obnoxious.
I wish them luck in their new enterprise.
I noticed GNOME started its downhill slide when William Jon McCann decided that changing screensaver settings wasn't something the user needed to do.
I am going to skip this and hold out for the Instagram OS
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Now maybe they will go off on their own and leave Linux alone.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Gnome is not being offered in most Linux destitutions, because Gnome developers were not supporting it. To fill in the gap there are new Gnome like desktops, such as Cinnamon and Mate which have new feature and are more friendly. So there is no reason to resurrect Gnome. Too bad because when they quit, they were on top.
There was a time when GNOME was a good idea. It works, it had support of vendors, and it evolved in a consistent fashion. I used it because it came with my distribution. Sometimes I used Ubuntu and other times Fedora, depending on my project. Both distributions supported GNOME and the difference from a user's perspective was small. Note that I was a professional Qt developer, but felt no urge to switch to KDE based on the my alliance with Qt.
Then came GNOME 3 with Fedora 16. I was baffled. The interface was not intuitive. It wasn't just the deviation from my expectations, but my total inability to do even the simplest task. I wrote to the project manager for Fedora and asked him what I should do, he suggested I try KDE. I am now using KDE as my desktop and find it manageable. There are lots of things I don't like, but it doesn't get it my way of doing work.
I own an iPad, iPhone, an Android Phone and Tablet, a Windows Phone 7, a Nokia N9, a MacBook and an Ultrabook running various Linux distributions and Windows 7. I am familiar and comfortable with touch screen devices and I think GNOME 3 is unusable. So excuse me if I don't buy the argument from GNOME that change is hard, and the release of GNOME 3 is all about the move from the desktop to touch devices. It is a bad, design that is unintuitive and clumsy and I pity the fools who decide it is a good platform for their product.
The OS X desktop environment is based on NeXSTEP. Saying a desktop environment is "based" on BSD makes no sense, but hopefully you're trolling and not actually a retard...
lrn2modularity, retards!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So, Mozilla is planning to make Firefox an OS. Gnome is planning to make Gnome an OS. Kde, well, QT already contains libraries for doing almost everything, so we are not that far.
Do we have a trend here?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Didn't you mean GNU/GNOME OS?
Gnome developers ...
No thanks.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Remember when Linus was extremely (and justifiably) enraged over how locked down it was, and how extensions just made the whole thing worse? In this case, we have the opportunity to have officially supported GNOME Shell extensions available through the GNOME repos, similar to Plasmoids.
Obviously it's still Linux so anybody who *wants* to create an extension and publish it is more than welcome to, but it'd be nice to have a list of officially supported Extensions. For people who learned how to use Shell and don't mind it, this might be a welcome change. Don't forget that KDE 4 was pretty unusable for the first three or four releases...
This will be the end of GNOME in most other distros. RH and Deb will probably figure out a way to make it work but others will drop it.
Why? Because the GNOME devs are going to start tightly coupling the desktop to things like init process and a file system layout. It will break all distro specific tools, and traditions and rather then write a bazillion patches distributors will simple stop packaging it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Gnome 3 made me rethink my love for gnome. I switched to KDE4, which does not need much more ressources than gnome3.
And guess what: I started liking KDE.
You can change ANYTHING, the downside is, that you HAVE TO CHANGE ANYTHING, but when done, it does its work.
Really, gnome is becomming the next M$,Apple monolithic thingy.
They even ported the registry!
Has anyone here heard about the new SolitareOS? It's slated to be an open source operating system with a playing-card style interface. Each application lives in the deck or on the tableau, to activate it, you move one of the app cards to one of the home cells. Application types must alternate to stack one on top of another, allowing them to run sort of simultaneously... a maximum of 52 apps is supported, 13 of each type... I mean, as long as people are starting to build entire operating systems around single pieces of software...
Remember the Atari 800? Each cartridge you popped in essentially loaded its own OS to do one principal thing, run that one game. The idea behind ChromeOS was similar, except instead of play a game, it was to browse the web. This is the same basic idea though, except that you can bolt a lot of functionality into a web browser, but you can theoretically add much functionality to a game too, so they're not so very different, a game and a web browser.
So now they're taking desktop environments that are meant to run as a client under the GUI environment SERVER, usually X, and going to elevate it to the status of development platform in it's own right. Was Gnome a victim of its own success? It's gotten to be such a pain in the ass recently that no one seems to want . Why do they continue? When will someone make a fork of Gnome, and call it Gnome II, (for 2) and have all the best features of 2, without having to force people to learn their new BS version of something they already know.
... I don't know what other fundamental problems exist with GNOME, but one that sticks in my craw is one I discovered where I cannot run GiMP 2.8.0 on older Linux distros which use an older version of GiMP. The problem has to do with the version of GTK in use. Turns out the desktop environment uses a version (which is linked to theming and other UI elements such as IME (input method editors)) which is too old for GiMP 2.8.x and so it won't run. You can compile the newer libraries but you lose desktop integration, theming and other UI elements such as IME. This means I can run GiMP, but I can't enter Japanese characters into my work. Nice right?
The problem here is they are building an OS/Desktop environment the way people build applications. Sorry, but GTK is for applications...specifically for GiMP. I don't know what the correct or best answer might be, but clearly some sort of software engineering line has been crossed or muddied somewhere and no one on either side of the problem (GiMP or GNOME) want to address it.
So the result? Windows and Mac users get better support running GiMP than this Linux user. The answer most people suggest is "run a newer distro!" Sorry, but that's not a fix. Newer distros update too frequenly and it doesn't address the underlying problem. And if the "answer" is to run distros which update frequently, then holy crap... do we really need to go into why THAT is a bad idea? I use CentOS (RHEL) because it is stable and doesn't change. I can run the newest versions of all programs I use EXCEPT GiMP. (Sure, I have to compile some of them as packages aren't always available, but that's the way things go... I share the packages I make anyway.)
So with just knowing this much about the GNOME project, I have to say they just aren't ready. They aren't drawing those lines separating OS+Desktop environment and applications.
We have set the goal of having a touch-compatible GNOME 3 within a maximum of 18 months
Remember when your mom asked you "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?"
Well, apparently the GNOME developers' answer was "Yes."
but spreading Free Software to a hardware ecosystem that is currently locked down and proprietary seems like a good goal to have.
Maybe in a vacuum it is. But do you have to kill the existing desktop environment to do it?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Translation: "I'm bored with what I'm working on and I want a shiny new project to play with."
I'd be willing to bet that a few guys got tired of working on Unity, and there wasn't a whole lot going on elsewhere in Gnome, so they're trying to find something fun to do. I don't think that bodes well.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You mean GNU/Gnome OS...
> Gnome 3 gets way too much hate on Slashdot. No, they did not photocopy
> The Mainstream, they re-engineered the GUI and underlying pinnings.
KDE and GNOME suffer from the "Microsoft Windows disease". Every time you learn the menus, etc, they change the GUI, and the way it operates. I expect a learning curve when switching to a new OS. But I should not have to repeat it every year or two.
I've been using ICEWM for several years, and it works. I have the bar on the bottom, with all apps and the launcher, plus a few dock applets. I prefer to spend my time doing real stuff, versus learning a "new and improved GUI" every year or two.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gnome 3 is a user interface abomination which needs to slide across the event horizon of a black hole and disappear. Even now, almost a year later as a KDE user, I shudder in horror at my attempt to use Gnome 3 to do the same productive work that I did in Gnome 2. Anyone who does not understand the blazing hatred that boils up against Gnome 3 doesn't use Linux to do professional software development.
Anyhow, having said that, Gnome OS is perfect - they can direct all their efforts into something that has almost no chance of going anywhere, and hopefully collapse it into a black hole.
Kinda like the movies "Based on a true story"
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
http://makeplaylive.com/
This is not a new end-user distro but a GNOME dev distro, for having all what is needed to build latest GNOME code out of the box and streamline the process for new devs. your are a bunch of jerks.
1) re-master ubuntu, call it GnomeOS
2) tell users to piss off again
3) implement suck
WIthout Canonical, Gnome has no user base to drive development. They need each other.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
But ... the evidence is that there are literally no GNOME developers who actually have touchscreen hardware:
There is no way Gnome 3 is designed for touch screens. Or at least,
not for touchscreen-only computers. I use Fedora 17 on a pen-based
computer (fujitsu stylistic) and I can tell you that if it were not
for the fingerprint reader on it, Fedora would be *UNUSABLE*. Whenever
Gnome 3 needs a password to connect to WiFi or to unlock the screen or
unlock following suspend, THERE IS NO WAY TO ENTER THE PASSWORD! The
password windows captures all mouse input so it is NOT possible to
bring up an onscreen keyboard.
So lets stop pretending Gnome 3 shell is for tablet-type computers. It
CANNOT BE USED ON A COMPUTER WITHOUT A KEYBOARD.
Oh, and when one IS able to use the on-screen keyboard, it has is no
tilda (~) character. Not that you would ever need to type a tilda on a
unix-like operating system.
I've filed bugs on all these complaints, but there has been no action.
Are you listening Gnome team?
If they have corporate sponsorship, and aren't just building a funhouse in the air, surely their company can spring for a tablet PC.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
thank you sooo much for making such a great (linux) desktop and also
making it open-source (and working with comp!z)
at this moment i am a very very happy user of MATE.mint, a fork
of your wonderful gnome 2 desktop.
i am sad to hear that you have decided to abandon it and continue with
your new endeavor (of reinventing the wheel). the best of luck to you (and
may it turn smoothly, even without comp!z)
yours kindly
"a happy gnome 2 user"
from what i understand the kernel and innards are a hybrid of BSD and the Mach mircokernal,with a few gnu utils thrown in. Where the gui and higher level stuff is NeXSTEP based with some old mac OS* bits throne in for good measure. OSX is a mongrel really.
here the wikipedia entry
(https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29)
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
you mean gnu/gnome/linux
other wise go get you own kernel.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
NeXTSTEP incorporated components of BSD which are still apparent in OS X to this day. So while OS X wasn't based directly on BSD, it was based on it in a roundabout way.
/* No Comment */
I'll get GNOME OS right after I purchase Windows 8.
Seeing has how the sole reason Cinnamon exists is how bad Gnome 3 is, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you were being ironic.
Don't ever, for the love of all that is holy, go down this (Gnome3) road. Some of us have zero interest in smartphones, tablets, name your gadget. We just want a desktop machine to do what a desktop should do. No touchscreen bullshit, no iNonsense, no hipster-douche-fag "apps" for buying Starbucks, nada. We are the people who use computers to do real work, type 60+ WPM on a REAL keyboard, and think that people should learn to use their computers instead of dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator. If someone can't learn to use menus, they can learn "fries with that, sir?" Ex-Gnome users are flocking to you now. Don't fuck it up.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Gnome's have been all wrong for a very long time. They're starting to pay for it.
I believe you are talking gtk2 vs gtk3 here, and you might have a problem with the IM gui. Apps using gtk3 (there's a few more such as audacious) would need the im ui to support gtk3 in addition to gtk2. Remember qt3/4 apps also need it?
For example there is uim-gtk2.0 and uim-gtk3 along with uim-qt3 and uim-qt packages in debian based distros.
This happened because you went out of the way installing an unsupported package. Normally when you upgrade your distro using its official repositories or install new from cd, you will have all the required apps already in place tested against the bundled packages.
Once you cross the line, you should be ready to face challenges and be willing to solve them, otherwise wait for your distro to do it properly.
If you were using Ubuntu LTS (support lasts 5 years) you would simply add a PPA for gimp 2.8 and maybe the aforementioned packages depending which IME you use. Perhaps your choice of distro is what locked you in the first place, or there is a proper way to fix your problem which you missed (ie, said packages in rpm, could and most certainly have different names).
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
I'm stoked that Gnome is doing this. I like the customizable interface and touch enabling it shouldn't be enough to knock it out of the race. I like docking panels and apps... ;)
l8r,
cj
They fucked up the Desktop good and proper and now they want to make an OS? Will they never learn?
Words fail me. Consider the lack of love (that's a generous term for hatred) for GNOME 3, and now they want to make an OS? I don't understand such hubris. Or maybe they're the smartest people in the world, and we out here in userland are just too dumb to recognize their genius.
you mean so when those said drivers cause or are referenced in a dump, it can't be debugged by anyone but the vendor if it chooses? yeah wonderful.. If I want that experience, I'd use windows 24/7. If nvidia is the example by which other vendors would (ab)use such a stable ABI, I hope it's never stabilized.
I think Gnome should focus on improving usability rather than focusing on all those touch/table novelty features, considering how much complaint they are getting.
GNOME 3 is a cluster fuck! Now we have arbitrarily added search bars in each of the Nautilus windows? How is that any different than clicking in the window and just typing the name of the file you want, until it is highlighted? At least the old way didn't make us suffer the loss of screen real estate.
http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/files/2012/07/nautilus.png
Slashdot continually attacks Gnome 3 while failing to acknowledge its design goals. Gnome 3 isn't Gnome 2, if you desire Gnome 2, then install it, Mate or Cinnamon.
Gnome 3 is designed for the average computer user, the type of person whom utilises her phone, tablet or laptop to post on social networking, text, find restaurants, plan with friends and all of the nice connected features so prevalent in today's technology. While you and may spend time in our terminal emulator of choice, write programs, open Firefoxes with hundreds of tabs, design and create, the average computer user only has a few programs open or even just one. As a college student, I've noticed tablet users attaching keyboards and typing notes and essays right on their tablet, okay with the annoying task switching process. Whereas I keep Firefox and Kindle open with my writer of choice to write essays, and likely have various other programs running such as Roxterm with a vim session, Devhelp for Gtk, and various other programs. The task switching mechanics of a phone, tablet, or Gnome 3 is absolutely annoying if you actually work on your computer, but for the average computer user whom doesn't need various tools open or only requires a typing program and a browser, it's perfectly acceptable.
Gnome 3 wasn't designed for the computer nerd, it was designed for the average user whom isn't going to use the terminal, and who wants flashy, skeuomorphs. It was designed for the average user who will only have a program or two open, and switching between them using alt tab or the Activities menu is acceptable and even easier. Have you ever seen the default Windows 7 interface? Beyond that, have you seen the default Windows 8 interface? What about OS X?
The computer nerd, the person who cares about resource consumption, those who want a completely customisable desktop beyond just a theme will not Gnome 3, that's obvious. Instead of attacking it, we should contribute to it. Are we so pretentious that we feel the need to push our views onto everyone else?
... it's not just user feedback that has been ignored. APIs that get backward-incompatible changes during minor version releases so everything breaks, poor developer documentation, duplicate reimplementation of everything in the latest must-have programming language, it's all a colossal clusterfuck.
Modded -1 as troll because Linux fanboys can't handle the truth.
iOS shares the basic Darwin system with OS X, it also shares OS X technologies, the frameworks for iOS are more selective and cocoa has different interface elements to cater for touch input and small displays, but essentially iOS inherits all it's gears from OS X.
so saying OS X is built from the ground up to be operated by a keyboard, mouse and monitor is Bullshit... Cocoa on OS X is built to be operated by with a keyboard, mouse and monitor... and Cocoa on iOS is built to be operated by fingers and tiny displays.
...because a Rolling Stone gathers Gnome OS.
Honestly, I'm in the market for just a plain 1:1 ripoff of win7's interface. It's minimalistic, flows well and allows me to get shit done. That is all.
My wife and I picked up a pair of identical Toshiba notebooks last year, preloaded (of course) with Windows 7. Our old machines were just that, old (7 and 8 years, respectively). Windows 7 was attractive and functional, a great step up from XP (her OS) and a lot prettier than XFCE (my preferred desktop on my ancient Dell).
What I found lacking in Win7 was virtual desktops. I had been using them for 11 years with CDE on Solaris (at work) and various flavors of Linux with Gnome, XFCE or KDE (at home), and I find virtual desktops incredibly helpful. Virtual desktops make my life easier. It seems like Microsoft should have been able to implement them by now.
Anyway, within a month I had installed Linux Mint 12 with KDE on my new notebook. I had virtual desktops back. It still bugs me, when I have occasion to use my wife's machine, that there is only one desktop in Windows.
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." -- Robert Heinlein