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.

Comments

Erm...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Good lord NO!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[KiloByte]

It's a real pity Debian wheezy won't have MATE. I currently use XFCE+Compiz 8.4 at home, but XFCE lacks quite a bit of polish one could take for granted in Gnome 2. Gnome 3 needs a number of extensions for even basic usability, and considering the direction the upstream is going, things are going worse rather than better.

Joey Hess recently made a controversial commit of making XFCE the default desktop environment in the installer. I fully agree with him, and hope people will recognize this commit (if it prevails...) as another warning for Gnome. The reasons stated were lack of place on CD 1 and Gnome3 having a totally different interface based on graphics drivers, but hey, since usability regressions are always debatable, this works too. I guess it's easier to add missing bits to XFCE than trying to stop Gnome from going down.

Goals

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Goals

[graphius]

At the risk of looking like a fool in 5 years or so (a la nomad vs ipod) I really don't see tablets taking off from where they are now. I can see them being popular consumption devices, and I can see them working in a very limited way for a few specialized projects, but I do not see the death of the desktop coming anytime soon.

Re:Goals

[someones]

Mainframes will never die. Their name will change, but they will never die.
"Cloud", im looking at you!

Re:No one cares

[smisle]

Yeah, but Apple is smart enough not to put iOS on their desktop computers. Something Windows and GNOME/Ubuntu could learn from.

Re:No one cares

[smisle]

It still has menus and a docking panel at least. Most of the new features are additions to the OS rather than replacements. Integrating the desktop OS with mobile users is different than treating those desktop users as if they WERE mobile users.

If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?

[JDG1980]

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."

Re:Why?

[Kjella]

Personally I find this whole deal with desktop interfaces to be a pretty big waste of resources, like rearranging toolbars and menus and trays and docks and plasmoids is what'll win people over. Maybe I'm just getting to be an old fart but my Win7 desktop in 2012 is looking pretty much like my Win95 desktop from 17 years ago. A launch icon, a taskbar of running apps and a tray of background services, most apps running in full screen. Maybe it's not new or fancy but it works pretty much like the steering wheel, gas and brake pedal of a car. They're instantly familiar and they do the job well enough.

Of course the back-ends have been rewritten many times over, to make sure whatever is behind the control panel and system provided tray icons is working but it looks mostly the same. And the apps have certainly improved, but really.... why is Gnome vs Unity vs KDE really still a big fighting issue? I mean seriously the OS is a means to an end to run applications, if you're spending so much time with it then you're doing it wrong. It's a bit like the people that spend more time tuning, styling and cleaning their car than they do driving it - you're kinda missing the point of it being a car. It's supposed to get you places.

Re:No one cares

[Tarlus]

And despite its iOS-isms, even the most recent version of OS X is still designed from the ground up to be operated by a keyboard, mouse and monitor.