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:Follow the money

[knorthern knight]

> What people tend to forget about GNOME is that a large chunk of the developers are
> employed by Red Hat. GNOME isn't worried about losing users because regular users aren't
> supplying their pay cheques, Red Hat is and that's why they get to call the shots and you don't.

There must be some MS moles at Redhat, secretly working to destroy linux...

* GNOME 2 was usable; destroyed.

* Got your linux PC's hard drive nicely partitioned? Sorry, must repartition because they f'd up udev.

* Like your current init system (other than systemd)? Sorry, you'll soon have have to go with systemd as your init if you use udev. That's because udev code has been rolled up into the systemd tarball. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.hotplug.devel/17392 At first they talked about long-term support for a separate udev. But they're rapidly changing their tune. See http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html
======
(Yes, udev on non-systemd systems is in our eyes a dead end, in case you haven't
noticed it yet. I am looking forward to the day when we can drop
that support entirely.)

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc
=====

Some people are getting pissed off enough that they're seriously looking at running linux without udev. The common replacement is the mdev utility from the busybox build. See...
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB
https://github.com/slashbeast/mdev-like-a-boss
https://blog.stuart.shelton.me/archives/891