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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."
Because 3 sucks and they don't listen to real users. Theory ain't the same as practice, in practice.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Is a big button on the panel that says "Make it Work Like Gnome 2" Or FVWM, I'm not picky.
GNOME devs are not going to aknowledge their mistake. No, for them, it's everyone else who are mistaked about the way they should handle their work. And, of course, it's GNOME devs who know it best. Their design is marvelous, all that is left is for user to bend himself to it.
That's why GNOME 3 is stripped of so much functionality, deemed "unneeded" by devs on the basis of them not needing it. And they continue upon this path: http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/
KDE has it, too, but to a lesser degree and most of the time they let user configure his environment.
I don't need great big things wasting pixels I paid for. I don't have the first touch screen in my home. Hard to see how I could even reach most of the usual 4 23" monitor setups if they WERE touchscreens. I don't need to explore my computer on every boot - I know what's on there because I put it there.
I create things, not consume them. Why should I have to put up with a screen manage for consume-only types that really does not fit my needs and which wastes my time by removing the few features I actually do use all the time. I don't give a shit about someone saying G2 looks antiquated, because I almost never even see anything of it - I use the pixels I paid for for my apps - many of which I wrote, not to just screw around in the opsys, but you know, actually USE the damn computer to do something useful.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Why does GNOME have to find new niches? It's the de-facto desktop installation for an awful lot of distributions and has been the primary choice for an awful lot of people for the past 10+ years.
It seems to me that they already had a huge user base and many more coming on-board through the likes of Fedora, Ubuntu and Linux Mint. They had a good thing going with a consistent toolkit (GTK+2), LGPL and some really nice software. From my humble perspective, this is a great starting point.
Instead they released GNOME 3. I have no idea who it's for? I remember GNOME 1.x and the thousands of configuration options - it was definitely overkill for a standard desktop environment. I think GNOME 3 is bad for exactly the opposite reasons - completely no customisation. I have no idea why they can't get this right and understand their target audience.
Fortunately, there are solid alternatives. However, I find it a great shame that GNOME seems to be determined to lose its userbase to meet some CS/HCI textbook ideal.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
From wikimedia stats we see that Linux users on the desktop aren’t growing. Only Android on tablets and smartphones is doing good. Linux is stagnating at 2%the only change is about users that switch to anoter distro.
Is it important that Linux isn’t growing on the desktop?
I think it is and we can’t just say: “oh I’m fine with my OS. Who cares about the rest of the world?”. The reason is that while on the servers you can choose to use whatever software you want. For example you want to use mysql, apache, python etcfor your website? It’s fine! Do you want to deliver videos in ogg/theora format? Yes you can. Who can stop you? That is because on the server you’re the king and the users must take what you give. It’s one of the reasons why Linux had not problem to grow in popularity on the server side.
But on the desktop you (as user) don’t decide everything, because in many cases you’re just a passive actor. The Linux market share is only 2%? Well the consequences are that Adobe stops delivering the Flash Player (while before was delivering a flash player that was crap). Netflix doesn’t ship his client for Linux. Games are not made for Linux (yes I heard about Steam but we’ll see how it goes). Maybe the Olympics in your nation will be streamed using a DRM that is not available for Linux . And most important: many professional programs will never land on Linux. So not only Linux won’t attract any new users, but also this will have the consequence to cut you out from many different things that will make Linux an inferior OS choice for the Desktop.
Then some Stallman’s fan could jump out and say: but I don’t want those things! I want to stay pure and do what Stallman says: use only software that respects my freedom. Yes suretoo bad that I don’t see a lot of the Linux people using gNewSense, having no proprietary drivers installed, no proprietary codecs and watching youtube videos without using the Adobe’s flash player (probably there are better examples) . I believe that most of the Linux users are not so strict to desire a 100% open source software on their machines. They love open source, but they also don’t want to be marginalized and they care about being able to use their computer to satisfy their needs
So I said all this to explain that:
a) The small market share has side effects on users on the Desktop and so is very bad that doesn’t increase
b) Most of the people want to use Linux not because they’re crazy about Free Software, but because they want an alternative between Microsoft and Apple
c) You can’t increase the market share if you have less to offer in respect of the other operating systems
So how do you increase the market share? In my opinion: You need to make great software that is not available for Windows and OSX.
Is it possible to do that with open source software? I’ve no idea. Probably not. Also I’m sure many open source developers don’t even like it.
I think most of the Gnome developers just don’t care if Linux is at 2% of if there are some annoyances, especially because I believe most of them don’t use Linux as their primary OS. They just love working together on Gnome, but they don’t have the pressure to reach real pragmatic goals. Because that would require some compromises.
So the only way to create an alternative to Microsoft and Apple (that is what I care most) will be to hope that one day some big company creates a new brand and ships computers with Linux and at the same time makes available some of the coolest proprietary programs you’ve ever seen. That someone could only be Google. Not like Dell and HP that keeps selling hardware with Linux as a third class choice, with no marketing and no ideas behind.
> Almost all software has that problem.
This. Especially among open source projects. I deeply appreciate their efforts, but when you go into their forums with a suggestion, or to ask why they are doing something a certain way (or more often nowadays, why they stopped doing something that everyone liked), you get scolded. Or talked down to. "Trust us, little man, we're the experts and we know what we're doing."
This article is about Gnome, but I'm still sore from the way the KDE developers handled their transition to version 4. Even the politest request was greeted with outright hostility. Gnome is by no means the only offender, nor is the offense limited to desktop environments. But it's a real problem.
I much prefer open source to proprietary software, but there's a price for the "free" stuff. I guess this is just part of it. A commercial software product that treated its "customers" the way that some FOSS projects do would be out of business in a matter of weeks.
Just my opinion and worth exactly what you paid for it. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
There's an extension for that..
Many extensions do that.. it goes against what gnome say, but they work. I've got my unread mail count in my panel..
Urgh.. I'm sure someone could write one. I always turn off "file manager on desktop" because having to move a window out of the way to start something is a waste of time. I normally use my desktop space with, er, windows... you can already put files on the desktop. You can turn it on with the tweak tool. KDE got it right by adding a desktop widget, so it didn't take over the entire desktop. If I want to start an app, I go "t..e..r.." ooh, a terminal in 5 key presses!
There's an extension for that, although once you get used to it, the "new desktop every time you use the last" option is something I really don't want to go back from. It's really efficient once you've mapped better keys to desktop switching. Especially once you have 2 monitors and you CAN'T switch desktops on the other one. It acts like a sort of main work screen while all the web/email crap is the stuff you switch. Of course, there's an app to enable switching on the other screen.
there's an extension for that. Although i'm not sure of the "remove the need". I prefer the overview - you don't have to use the mouse in it.
They ARE options. Try http://extensions.gnome.org./ There's even a single click on/off button for each extension to turn them on and off.
Honestly, people use it for 5 minutes and suddenly think they're an expert on desktop design by saying "lets make it like gnome 2!"
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
I'm one of those rare people who stuck with that piece of shit and actually got the hang of using it efficiently. None of the suggested windows-95 throwbacks in the article are things I WANT back. I install about 5 extensions out of the box, and the only "tweak" I use is turning on focus-follows-mouse and making better keyboard shortcuts for desktop switching. The auto desktop management thing is a really efficient way of working once you get used to it, rather than assigning 4 desktops to different activities, then after an hour of use realising you've been putting the wrong windows on the wrong desktops and that you've got shit everywhere. It makes you think where you put your windows.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Writing software is not "art". It's not there to be appealing. Writing software is about building tools, and when you're dealing with tools, the "right way" exists.
I've written a ton of commercial software, and if you're going to do it right, the first step is convincing the customer that they don't know what they need, and that your very first task will be interviewing them so you can give them a document that tells them what they need.
If you can't convince the customer of this truth, you're usually better off firing the customer. Not only do they usually take more time to deal with than the money justifies, but they actually train you to become shortsighted and less effective and leave you slightly crippled moving forward.
None of which means I like Gnome 3... but this stupid desire to abandon the WIMP metaphor and transform the powerful tools we know and love into crippled and useless entertainment devices seems to be industry wide, and neither a Gnome specific problem nor an open source problem.
The screwball thing about it all is, Windows 8 is coming down the pipe, it looks to be just as fucked up as Gnome 3 is... and the open source community no longer has a decent and well supported WIMP desktop available to capitalize on the opportunity.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I think one of the things that often gets forgotten was that Gnome 3 ended up in a war with Canonical in March 2011. Canonical represented somewhere between 50-80% of the user base. Once Canonical came to believe that the Gnome foundation simply would not listen to their point of view and their only alternative was to fork things went downhill badly. I think its time for Gnome to admit they lost this war.
Canonical instead of pushing the advantages of Gnome 3 focused heavily on the minus. Instead of easing their customer base into Gnome 3 they moved them away from it towards their Unity / Wayland vision. Canonical could have helped to soften some of the rough edges and at the same time Gnome thought deeply about consistency and functionality issues which have haunted Canonical.
The most popular Gnome desktop is now Cinnamon which is a fork. The second most popular is Mate which is a rejection of Gnome 3 entirely. KDE developers consider Gnome to have bullied and lied to them about cooperation so Gnome is likely to see less cooperation.
There are some brilliant aspects of Gnome 3. And I could see it evolving into truly the best desktop OS around. But it won't have the time or support to do that, in the current state of alienation. They have minor technical problems but large political problems. It is time to address the politics and compromise a bit to get back to a situation where they aren't decaying rapidly.
Try XFCE4... you will be surprised.
Tomorrow is another day...
in Japan, to launch Gnome shell,
1. click "Dash" or hit Windows-key.
2. check IME is disabled.
3. Alt+Space to disable IME.
4. wait a moment.
5. double-check IME is disabled now.
6. type "Tanmatu" and hit Space.
7. check IME suggests "" ("terminal", in Japanese) properly.
8. hit Enter twice.
9. Alt-Space to disable IME.
What's a great userbility!!
There are no shortcut like Windows, type "term", Enter.
and additionaly, Japanese users must guess which translated words associated to what one want to get.
Terminal, shell, command-prompt and many other words may be translated to "". Accept both English and Japanese in launcher does not help us.
Microsoft's done it precisely twice. Ribbon, Metro.
Add the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 UI to the list as well. I know a lot of people here diss Windows 3.x, but at the time a lot of users hated 95 and wanted to go back.
(I was one of them, not because of the UI, but because 95 was a buggy piece of shit)
Oh, and Bob would have counted if they could have gotten the computer companies on their side. A few actually included it as the default interface.
While it's a lot more minor, I personally also include the blue candy look that XP defaulted to. I hated the default XP theme and always changed it to the classic theme on any machine I had to work on. Fortunately, by the time XP was widespread, I no longer worked with Windows :)
Meanwhile, open source?
The fuck is wrong with you people?
Lack of strong leadership, generally, although you also have to account for trends in UI design that evolve over time. Today, most people run GNOME or KDE. Back in the day, it wasn't like that at all - commercial users used CDE (unavailable for free software) or OpenLook (which never gained much traction on free software for some reason). The free UNIXes had a bunch of different window managers along with a bunch of different toolkits. Most of us thought OpenSTEP would take us away from Athena and Tk, but that never really happened. Window managers explored a bunch of different ideas, and Enlightenment was going to make the world a better place if only anyone could afford a machine that could run it.
KDE and GNOME came along and unified a bunch of stuff, but in doing so you lose choice and control over your desktop. GNOME especially has tried to remove options and configurability to try to appeal to some hypothetical end user who couldn't be trusted with sharp objects and tended to try to eat rocks. GNOME 3 is a logical extension of this philosophy.
Here's the kicker: you don't have to play. You can install your distro's GNOME and deal with it, or you can find something you like that's stable and stick with it. I use a highly customized FVWM setup that hasn't changed significantly since about 1998.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
I remember a few years ago when my dad started using Ubuntu. He'd previously used Windows all his life but was sick of all the spyware on his computer.
At one point he called me and said "all my windows have disappeared!" Once I saw what he'd done, it was obvious - he'd changed workspaces and his all windows were on the previous workspace. But he had no mental model of how workspaces worked, and he wasn't even sure if his documents were still open. When I fixed it for him, he remarked something about Linux being really complicated.
When I installed Compiz and enabled the Desktop Cube animation, he mentioned that workspaces suddenly made sense. If he accidently switched to the workspace on the right, it was obvious how to "fix" it - you just need to rotate the cube back in the reverse direction.
Sure, it's eye candy to us, but animations can be used to help users understand what is going on in a desktop. Most Slashdotters are probably familiar enough with workspaces that they don't need to think about them, but keep in mind that it is a completely abstract concept. Animations can help communicate to new users how UI elements have been, and can be, manipulated.
First of all, skimming forums for feedback about the changes in Gnome3 gives you zero people that appear coherent throughout their posts that actually like the changes, apart from some Gnome3 developers. Go figure. The amount of people bitching about not being able to do things window managers have given people since TWM and CDE were the latest thing is simply overwhelming.
Second of all, tablets may be getting more popular, but you're replacing desktop user interfaces so at the very least, retain the features, possibly configurable, that make up a decent desktop window manager. For instance, no screen saver configuration or selection? What?? No hot corner selection? You need third party plugins to get you an icon you can click once to open applications?
You may be right about making assumptions, but it's not this guys task to do research in to what users want and how they like the changes. That task is for the gnome development team and they haven't done that ever. Not before, not during and not after the release of Gnome3.
Now what case can be made for gnome3 changes? I haven't seen one tablet manufacturer that adapted Gnome3 as their UI, I've seen literally hundreds of users complain, I haven't seen more than a handful people that like the changes, most of them being Gnome3 developers and thus biased. If you want a case to be made for the Gnome3 changes, why don't you do so yourself instead of blaming other people they're not doing it for you? What are those merits you are talking about? How much users has "gnome" gained since the introduction of Gnome3? I'm willing to bet the absolute number user base has dropped, while both Win7 and OSX have grown, so comparing Gnome3 to those makes Gnome3 look bad.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
This isn't true. The users want a consistant HIG and design philosophy across all applications, and a consistant reliable release schedule, with an open plan. This is what they did, and it worked, for 8 years or so. Not perfectly, but it worked.
The problem is that we're terrible with the big projects. Gnome3 is just a by-product of this. GStreamer on gnome2 wasn't stable for 4 years after gnome2 introduced it in 2.02! 4 years! The problem is releasing stuff broken, and hoping the community will fix it, instead of releasing stuff working, and encouraging developers to add capability.
"they basically just dismissed 3.x, said "we ain't doing it no more". That is just not true. We released two more releases of KDE 3.5 after KDE 4.0 was released.