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

No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

So a whole OS that is dumbed down so even a retard would find it frustrating to use?

Re:No one cares

[metamatic]

So a whole OS that is dumbed down so even a retard would find it frustrating to use?

Look at how much money Apple makes from iOS.

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.

Re:No one cares

[DoofusOfDeath]

I am retarded you insensitive clod!

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.

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...

Re:Erm...

[ozmanjusri]

I'm using the Cinnamon fork of Gnome 3, and consider it to be elegant and useful.

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!!!!!

[Scarred Intellect]

I'm just happy they committed to maintaining the desktop as the primary platform. I fully expected a fully integrated system that would support mobile apps and input methods including touchscreens and whatever garbled buzzwords they wanted to fit in there.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'd characterize Gnome's movement as Brownian.

So you're saying it's "crap"?

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[miketheanimal]

For a bit of fun, I tried Haiku-OS out yesterday. Its a bit limited, but dear god its fast - in a VirtualBox, boot to GUI in maybe 5 seconds. If someone - anyone - could produce a mainline Linux/GUI that performs anywhere near like that, they'll get my vote.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[SpzToid]

Gnome 3 gets way too much hate on Slashdot. No, they did not photocopy The Mainstream, they re-engineered the GUI and underlying pinnings.

For me, I had to take a moment to consider what the devs delivered. I tried a lot of stuff, including Unity on my Netbook and Gnome 3 gets my vote for most-efficient window management and task-switching on the tiny netbook screen. From there, I cautiously tested, then upgraded my main Ubuntu workstation to Gnome 3 as well. For folks willing to seriously consider Gnome 3, here's a total of about 5(!) minutes of training videos on YouTube to fast-track your efforts: https://www.youtube.com/user/GNOMEDesktop

Bottom line in my experience is I have successfully learned to manage my working windows more efficiently than before on both my workstation's double-monitors as well as my netbook's tiny screen. This is worth a lot to me going forward.

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.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[Urza9814]

Did you even bother to read the _summary_?

I know, I know -- of course not, this is Slashdot.

Seriously though, that's not the point. They don't WANT everyone to switch to their distro. It sounds more like an internal thing purely for testing and development. What's wrong with that?

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[diegocg]

Wait, people needs training videos just to learn how to handle windows?

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[knuthin]

Gnome at least is moving forward.

Three years ago, I used GNOME because it was so intuitive, my mother could use it. Go back and think about how awesome it used to be.

After building the *drumrolls* for more than a year, GNOME3 was the crap we were presented. There are GNOME extensions made to make GNOME3 look like GNOME2 again (doesn't help, but the fact that they exist tells a lot)

Too bad, Xfce is the closest GNOME2-y thing these days. GNOME2 actually felt relevant.

Footnote: What touch device is running GNOME3 anyway?

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[ahabswhale]

I still don't see the point. Proving your code works in some perfect world Gnome distro doesn't mean it will work in a consumer distro.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[SpzToid]

Sure, why not? It is not the same. It is different from what you were expecting, perhaps. So the devs have made an effort to document their work.

Like, previously I had no idea how to easily scale a window to consume exactly half of my display-space. But watching one of those short videos clarified it to me so I can make use of the feature. In fact, I later tried the same technique using Windows 7 and it also worked. I am pleased someone made the effort as easy as possible for me to learn.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[RabidReindeer]

Have you tried Unity or KDE or the other stuff out there?

They're all crap.

Gnome at least is moving forward.

Not forward. Definitely not forward. Not even Brownian. Very definitely retrograde. It lost critical features of the earlier Gnome desktops.

Between that and the obsession of Gnome's original creator on Things Microsoft, I'd expect a Gnome OS to be a lot like Windows ME.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[garyebickford]

No, but it does mean there is a known-working distro that distro-maintainers can refer to and compare to their own in development, to determine why feature X is working in the Gnome distro but not in theirs - that is a useful tool. It also means that a comparative testing environment can be set up, to automate (to some extent) the regression testing process. With a bit of camera and image processing work it might even become mostly-automated.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[garyebickford]

I currently use XFCE+Compiz 8.4 at home

How did you set that up? I am a long time user of Compiz, and in fact would prefer to just stay in Compiz-land all the time. I started to set up an XFCE + Compiz environment on a 'new' machine, but got bogged down - I confess not spending a lot of time on the project. Any hints/clues appreciated.

(Wishes #1: a way for panel widgets from some other desktop environments to live inside Cairo, so I can add them to my Dock, or an additional dock, all within the 3D environment. This might also take some load off Cairo developers, since any other dock or panel features could be added without further development.)

(Wishes #2: A way to make desktop icons not clickable - I use the Cube in transparent-all-the-time mode with an animated background. But there is some stuff parked on my Desktop and sometimes I accidentally click on one of those when I really just want focus outside any windows.)

(Wishes #3: Extend Compiz to handle arbitrary 'rooms' rather than just the Cube - I have found that you can extend the cube to an arbitrary number (limit?) of sides, so it can be an Octagon if you want. But what I'd really like is to build a multi-room 'house' with different stuff on the 'walls' in each 'room' - analogous to desktops in each room. Then I could go to the 'email room', or the 'office docs room', etc.)

The above are in increasing 'blue sky' -> 'fantasy' order... :)

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[KiloByte]

I did try it, works well. Heck, that's what I'm testing at work, to reduce unnecessary churn.

Problems I noticed so far: 1. it doesn't migrate Gnome2 settings, 2. remmina from wheezy interacts badly with mate-screensaver while in full-screen mode. On the other hand, they already have fixed quite a few old bugs.

I feel really uneasy about using some random repository though, for something as big as a whole desktop environment.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[KiloByte]

Heh, I go the opposite way: I have all eyecandy disabled, and use Compiz for features like:

* quick arbitrary zoom. Good for adjusting pixel-perfect graphics or debugging antialiasing. And, with nettles starting to pollinate, I find myself with blurry eyes, having to zoom random stuff just to be able to read.

* partial transparency of windows. I always make primary windows full-screen; a small almost-opaque media player window in the right upper corner allows watching something while coding, and if some unwrapped line of text happens to go that far, it is visible just enough to read it without having to switch windows.

* windows not losing their contents when switched away. With any other window manager, a SDL/etc program becomes a broken window while being debugged.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[knuthin]

Gnome3 is probably a LOT more intuitive.

Are you telling me you did NOT search for a shutdown button in the initial GNOME release? I mean, who the fuck presses Alt just to see "logoff" change to "shutdown" (It was the default, don't know about the current GNOME release. I hope they fixed it)

Support your statement with facts.

Re:Good lord NO!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what Gnome does. They build up a feature complete desktop over some years. Then, they rewrite it, removing almost every feature. Rinse, repeat. 1.4 --> 2.0 was almost as depressing as 2.32 --> 3.0.

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!

Honestly

[skipkent]

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.

Re:Honestly

[SuricouRaven]

Don't worry, Microsoft is planning to fix that soon enough.

Re:Honestly

[kaiser423]

Yea. Windows 7 strikes a nice balance between being able to use the keyboard for just about everything, while providing a pretty full featured, but simple interface. I can navigate directories in the explorer GUI by typing just like I would in a shell, whether I click on the nav bar or just have focus, I can launch/search/whatever after pressing the command key, and so on and so forth. It's really just *polished* and I haven't seen anything nearly as good yet.

Hell, I had KDE4 latest version in a VM the other day, and I drug across a file from Windows onto the KDE desktop in VMWare. It copied fine, I I didn't drag to one of those folder/widget thingy's on the desktop, just the base desktop. Couldn't figure out how to move the file somewhere else. Did updatedb/locate, searched around manually, etc. Nothing could find the file. Posted in the Ubuntu forums, and was told that I wasn't supposed to drag files to *just* the desktop. That that didn't work. Suggested work-around was to just re-copy it across. I was floored. Apparently it was in some weird desktop DB backend or something that KDE uses. I never plan on using KDE4 again, if drag/drop of files can put them in places where I can't get to them.

All that's missing is a kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Inevitability of Mediocrity

[Rambo Tribble]

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?

Why?

[glebovitz]

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.

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:Stop doing everything.

[TheDarkMaster]

And also interesting, all this "OSs" are simply Linux flavours, not really "new" OSs. Wake me up when someone really creates a original OS.

They aren't ready...

[erroneus]

... 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.

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:If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?

[21mhz]

There were enough people modding your post insightful, so I gather that even the intent of adding touch support to the otherwise desktop-oriented environment (as TFA clearly says) is a total disaster. I don't know why, though.

First, get at least 1 touchscreen

[David Gerard]

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.