GNOME: Possible Recovery Strategies

An anonymous reader tips an article from Datamation about several suggestions for the GNOME project to answer user complaints and boost developer morale. From the article: "... with very few changes, GNOME 3 could be much more acceptable to most users. A moveable panel, panel applets, desktop launchers, user control of virtual desktops, menu alternatives that would remove the need for the overview -- all of these could be added easily as options. Together, they would reduce at least ninety percent of the complaints against GNOME 3. ... If GNOME is having trouble as a desktop environment, one obvious solution is to find new niches. Lopez and Sanchez suggested following KDE's lead and producing a tablet, while Lionel Dricot recently suggested a suite of cloud-based services. ... The one strategy that GNOME has never tried is asking users what they want. Instead, the project has preferred to rely on usability theory, treating it as an exact science instead of a collection of competing ideas supported by usually inconclusive studies that could be mustered to support almost any design. In GNOME 3, testing with actual users did not occur until near the end of the development cycle, when the chances of any major changes were remote."

Comments

Re:Staying with gnome2

[Derek Pomery]

According to the MATE developers (the guys maintaining a fork of Gnome2) there is one technical reason you can't have both.
Gnome is not designed for multiple versions to be installed simultaneously. There are name collisions.

You can have multiple versions of KDE installed. Not Gnome.

According to the MATE devs ( irc://irc.freenode.net/mate ), that's why they had to rename pretty much everything.

I can attest that MATE and Gnome3 *can* be run on the same machine, although MATE is still getting on its feet.

And some distros are offering both.