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!!!!!

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'd characterize Gnome's movement as Brownian.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:No one cares

[DoofusOfDeath]

I am retarded you insensitive clod!