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

Staying with gnome2

[DCFusor]

Because 3 sucks and they don't listen to real users. Theory ain't the same as practice, in practice.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[gagol]

OpenSource economics are different from commercial ones. The end goal is offering something unique that will appeal to a set of users. The fact that you can install a DE from many providers means people who prefer traditional desktops can turn to LXDE/XFCE, if you want eye-candy and "paradigm" buzzwords, you can use KDE/GNOME, you prefer a tiling desktop, install AwesomeWM, etc...

My point is, the end goal is to fill the niche, GNOME3 try to fill them all and failed to find it's sweet spot...

Re:Staying with gnome2

[buchner.johannes]

Because 3 sucks and they don't listen to real users. Theory ain't the same as practice, in practice.

The largest screwup was not by GNOME but by distributions in my opinion.

They abandoned GNOME3 for GNOME2 after it was released, not bothering to offer both choices. Some like Gentoo do provide the choice, for bleeding-edge distros like Fedora I understand that they went with the newest. But user-distros shouldn't have gone for GNOME3 only, and there is no technical reason to not offer both.

I think GNOME wants to build a interface for users and not for developers, which is why the slashdot community is a bit pissed (not being the target audience, complaints about "dumbing down".

KDE is elaborate and clunky; XFCE is a good tradeoff; more minimal WM are just toys for having multiple terminals. The choices offered to users by distributions was better a few years ago.

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.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[Electricity Likes Me]

I blame the MS Ribbon. It was the first shot fired in the modern era of UI redesigns, wherein it was decided that the real problem was there was no way to force user's to use it until they like it.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[epyT-R]

You don't make a case for the gnome 3 changes here. You just make assumptions about the people who criticize it. Old stuff isn't necessarily worse than new stuff, and new stuff isn't necessarily worse than old stuff. They both must stand on their merits. This trend of minimalism in modern UIs and applications was fine until they started cutting needed features and/or flexibility for its sake. Gnome 3 is doing this along with windows 8, and osx. I'm sorry, but I don't need all these assumptions made about where I keep my windows on a workstation class machine. They are not tablets.

Change for the sake of change isn't innovation.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[techno-vampire]

Or you can try actually learning the new system - it really is better.

What you mean is, "It's better for me." I want to be able to put my panel where I want it, not where the devs want it and I don't think I should have to install a third-party extension to do that. I don't want to have to use gestures to get to a list of applications, I want to use both icons and menus. I want to be the one who decides how many workspaces I have, and what programs appear on which. AFAIK, none of those things are possible in Gnome 3, which is why I now use Xfce, where they are. I might add that after a year of fighting with Ubuntu's Unity DE, which is pretty much a clone of Gnome 3, my sister gave up on it and now uses Xfce as well.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[gbjbaanb]

I also blame MS, but not for the ribbon (that's just a symptom of a greater underlying disease). The reason MS has dumped the start menu - because their usability labs have decided that users don;t actually use it, 90% of users preferring to stick icons on the desktop (you've seen them) or pinned to the taskbar.

Now while that is undoubtedly true, and shows that quick-access to often-used programs is a very important feature, it forgets to note that people still use the start menu for all apps that are not quick-launched. But, hey, that doesn't matter, the last 10% of user activity can be sacrificed in the name of statistical user input.

Same with the ribbon - its basically a quick-launch menu, only forgetting about the bits you do not use often.

It seems Gnome has the same problem, focussing on a flawed assumption that if a user doesn't use something all the time, then they don't use it at all.

Not just Gnome

[Meshach]

The one strategy that GNOME has never tried is asking users what

Almost all software has that problem.

Re:Not just Gnome

[smpoole7]

> 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. :)

Re:Not just Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

In that analogy, trying to put a tablet UI on a PC desktop environment would be like trying to put a steering wheel on a horse.

Re:Not just Gnome

[UnknownSoldier]

> Writing software is not "art".
Sorry, you're wrong. Yes, there is a lot of science in Computer Science, but since this topic is about UI -- as soon as you start interacting with users, there are times when it is OK to break the UI rules. The *hard* part is knowing when to be consistent, and when not to. People, nor how they interact with computers does NOT always fit in a nice little black-n-white box that naive programmers love to think.

And just to be pedantic, here is real-world example: (Since /. is a POS for code formatting, replace the _ with spaces...)

The most important thing for writing code is: proper variable names, whitespace to align common idioms

function SwapInt32( x )
{
        var n _= (x >> 24) & _____ 0xFF;
            n |= (x >>_ 8) & ___ 0xFF00;
            n |= (x <<_ 8) & __0xFF0000;
            n |= (x << 24) & 0xFF000000;
        return n;
}

Proper alignment makes it easier to read code. There are no hard and fast rules for whitespace.

> It's not there to be appealing.
Methinks
a) you missed the joy of optimizing code and coming up with a smaller and faster algorithm, nor
b) even grok the purpose of whitespace in the first place. Hint: Whitespace is NOT for the compiler's / interpreter's benefit but _humans_.

> the first step is convincing the customer that they don't know what they need,
Yes we understand your point that "No, the customer is not always right".

But riiiiight, like the customer is always some clueless schmoe. News flash, sometimes, they have been using software *longer* then your little code monkey shop has been in business for. While they may not know exactly what they want, it pays attention to try to understand their perspective and what are they *really* getting at. One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.

In the *real* world, *sometimes* client ARE knowledgable -- AND sometimes they are completely clueless. Your job as a programmer is to bridge that gap, and learn to get at what they are *really* wanting.

If you think programming is black-n-white you obviously haven't been doing it very long, or you suck at it.

Re:Not just Gnome

[MikeBabcock]

No offense, but I hope I never have to use your software.

User interfaces are all about art. A right way doesn't necessarily exist. Is right clicking better than a button? Are four buttons too many, or is seven? How many view types should be on one screen?

These vary from system to system, function to function, and a piece of software may work perfectly but suck because the user can't use it efficiently or simply hates using the software.

Lots of picky examples exist from the mundane like when I mouse over the chat window in Facebook, I expect the chat window to scroll, not the main window, when I roll the mouse wheel -- to the customer I have who want Enter to go to the next field in a form not tab because that's how it would work on a spreadsheet or a calculator.

Form shouldn't override function -- but form is very important, and almost entirely art.

Re:Not just Gnome

[spauldo]

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.

Re:Not just Gnome

[smpoole7]

> One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.

Another thing I have suggested for ANYONE writing software -- whether FOSS or proprietary -- is to hand your software package to an end user. Then go sit in another room and watch them through a window. You can't help them or give them tips. Watch whether they struggle with it.

I've done this myself and 15 minutes watching a real, live, end user is more profitable than anything I can think of. Speaking from experience, the first thing you'll likely discover is that there are libraries on your development machine that aren't on the end user's, and you forgot to include them in the package (even if only as listed dependencies for the package manager). But once you get it installed, you sit back and watch. Look at their frustration as they try to figure out which menu items to click to do what they want.

More often than not (I've seen this, too, unfortunately) is they'll just give up and go back to what they're used to. If they can't easily navigate around your Brand New Thing(tm), they're going to blow it off.

I think that if everyone who developed software would do this simple bit of research, it would be a much happier world. :)

What Gnome 3 Needs

[rcjhawk]

Is a big button on the panel that says "Make it Work Like Gnome 2" Or FVWM, I'm not picky.

Re:Extensions

[redmid17]

Great point. Everyone prefers a piece of shit out of box that you have to shine and polish to make look nice.

They won't listen anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They won't listen anyway

[Junta]

Holy crap:

A lot of reasons people have been using this view are due to the other two views sucking for various reasons ... The role for compact view is unclear. Our research suggests that it is something like: the only view that works for browsing a lot of files at once. This is really hard to reconcile with providing good defaults that just work and having consistency with the file chooser.

So you admit people are using the view, it works best for browsing lots of files, and somehow, this means the reason for existence is unclear somehow so you should delete it because you don't use it yourself?

Meanwhile, they try to circle the wagons and discuss what to do to address an issue of dwindling support:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE0ODg
Their conclusion including how to address brain drain and exodus of users? *MORE* Gnome 3, stop thinking about the desktop paradigm as much and make it more different, and Gnome hasn't taken over *enough* and needs to be its own OS.

Oh well, guess GNOME will descend into oblivion. They had some neat aspects in Gnome 3, but it's just so hard to deal with some of the intended design choces that they clearly have no intention of revisiting.

Revert back to what worked

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME 2 wasn't broken when ivory tower developers decided to fix it.

Why not spend development resources optimizing accelerated graphics performance and squashing bugs?

Don't screw up the perfectly fine UI because you have nothing else to do. (GNOME 3)

Don't bloat the whole DE beyond belief and require users run multiple heavy daemons with a questionable approach to privacy. (KDE)

Don't be an incomplete and lacking project borne of frustration with other ones. (Xfce)

Re:Revert back to what worked

[couchslug]

"Don't screw up the perfectly fine UI because you have nothing else to do. (GNOME 3)"

Al UI should constantly change because change is progress.

That's why the letters of the alphabet are revised every few years.

Re:Best strategy

[darkfeline]

Alternative: make a cute anime girl mascot.

Re:Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

The functionality is available as Linux comes with a C/C++ compiler.

Re:I think Gnome 3 is lightyears ahead of Gnome 2.

[DCFusor]

I won't even argue that. But I have around 20 desktops, and zero tablets or phones. Gnone3 utterly sucks, adds nothing new, but takes away features I liked in gnome 2.

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.

"Find new niches"

[mattsday]

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.

Re:"Find new niches"

[Dracos]

I have no idea why they can't [...] understand their target audience.

Because starting with Gnome3, they decided their target audience is tablet/touchscreen users. There has not been, nor is there ever likely to be, hardware installed with Linux+Gnome3 out of the box. They decided to cater to an audience that does not exist.

Gnome3, Unity, and the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro all suck donkey balls, assuming you don't believe the few users who have completely adapted their usage patterns and workflows, after much effort, for minimal gains. Any perceived simplicity is actually just more complexity hidden beneath the surface.

And this is all beside the fact that touch UIs are innately less capable than the traditional keyboard+pointer paradigm.

Re:"Find new niches"

[pscottdv]

I keep reading this, that Gnome 3 is for tablet computers. Where does this come from? I'll tell you where it doesn't come from: people using it on tablet computers! I tried to use it on a tablet computer. It does not work. If you ever used it on a tablet computer you would discover in the first two minute, as I have, that Gnome 3 IS UNUSEABLE ON A TABLET COMPUTER!

Gnome 2? Works fine. KDE? No problem, LXDE? Works great. Gnome 3? YOU HIT THE WALL IN TWO MINUTES! TWO MINUTES!

I actually like Gnome 3. I want to use it. I use it on my desktop and my laptop. But the Gnome developers won't fix bugs even when they are complete show-stoppers. Hey Gnome team! How about making a password dialog box that, I don't know, maybe actually allows a guy to bring up an onboard keyboard instead of taking over the desktop?

Re:Extensions

[93 Escort Wagon]

That could work for most /. users but most regular users neither know how to enable extensions or care enough to learn.

We're talking about desktop Linux here - "regular users" aren't really a concern.

try downloading some extensions...

[sqldr]

A moveable panel

There's an extension for that..

panel applets

Many extensions do that.. it goes against what gnome say, but they work. I've got my unread mail count in my panel..

desktop launchers

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!

user control of virtual desktops

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.

menu alternatives that would remove the need for the overview

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.

all of these could be added easily as options.

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!"

Car analogy

[MichaelSmith]

So out of the box every control is a switch under the instrument panel but you can install your own extensions with steering wheels, pedals, etc if you want.

Any recovery strategy starts with "We're sorry."

[erroneus]

The first thing that would get everyone's attention is an apology and/or acknowledgement that they did it wrong.

There was nothing wrong with wanting to create a tablet friendly UI... nothing at all. What was wrong was trying to foist it onto desktop users. Wanna make a tablet UI? Great! Do that in ADDITION to what you already had *AND* make them compatible with each other so that a user or a program can work easily in either.

The desktop isn't going away any time soon. The very notion that people are ready to move on into the tablet hype world is ridiculous.

It's understandable that no one would want to be left behind or to have a fear that you might be considered late to the party or irrelevant if you don't have one ready when the market wants it, but to push it onto the market before it wants it? What were they thinking?

And I'm sorry developers might have low morale, but that bad smell they've been wondering about isn't coming from the breath of the users complaining, it's because they had their heads up their asses... which might explain why they couldn't hear the users...

The war with Canonical

[jbolden]

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.

Re:Extensions

[MikeBabcock]

I don't want to think where I put my windows. I know my personal browser sessions are on 3, along with any game I might be playing, my E-mail and other contact managers are on 1, and my database interface and Eclipse are running on 2.

When I want to save a window for later, I toss it over to 4.

I shouldn't have to think about it. That's how proper organization works.

Imagine for a moment if your clothing drawers automatically created and deleted drawers so you had to figure out where you'd put something, and if you took the last sock out of the sock drawer, the shirt drawer wouldn't be where you expected it. We use metaphors on desktops to help users organize their data, including the folder system. Making those metaphors less realistic kills their ability to use them for organization.

for languages require IME

[causeless]

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.

Thoughts from a core GNOME 1.x and 2.x developer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an old core GNOME developer, around for the 1.4 - 2.x days. I haven't been involved in GNOME 3, but I think they're on to some really cool things, even if there are serious problems now. These flamewars make me sad.

Many (most) of these comments remind me of the same slashdot.org discussions between GNOME 1.x and GNOME 2... I should remember; I was one of the core GNOME 2 devs who was flamed to hell.

Now people are talking like GNOME 2 was some sort of epitome of Linux desktops, and couldn't-we-just-stick-to-that-pretty-please. It also reminded me of the flack that KDE 3 developers took. Talk about whiplash. I don't think many people comparing GNOME 1.4 to GNOME 2.32 would prefer the former, and yet, to hear the cries on slahdot at the time, GNOME 2.x was doomed and nobody used it, and nobody would ever use it. Dooooooooomed. Doooooooooomed I say.... because we were all such complete idiots that we couldn't tie our shoelaces without shitting our pants. ;-)

I notice two things:
1) Free software desktops are often a little half-baked between major UI revisions. This does suck, but I think its a outcome of volunteer hackers... sometimes its hard to wait long enough to add all the features people like and miss before doing a major rev. Frankly, an effect you often see is a decrease in hacking if a project goes too long without a release (makes sense psychologically, right? sort of related to delayed gratification....).

For example: GNOME 2.0 was stinky. People flamed the hell out of us (in many ways, rightfully, it was half-baked), and not JUST about our current state, but speculatively that this represented some insane mis-step for the project. Instead of imagining what the negative-changes could allow in the future, they pretended like we were retarded, and driving the ship as fast as possible straight to hell. No benefit of the doubt. Now I don't want to apologize for this, I think free software should be held to the high quality standards of commercial software, but I mention this because its important context to the sort of panic-reaction people are displaying, assuming GNOME 3.0 betrays some fundamentally flawed direction rather than viewing it as "released too early, too half-baked, before certain necessary things happened".

By GNOME 2.6 it was pretty awesome. By GNOME 2.12 pretty much everyone just shut the fuck up. A number of users found GNOME 1.x more to their liking and moved on to other desktops, but we picked up Waaaaaaaaaaaaay more users than we lost. Today, I think most people would cringe if they had to use GNOME 1.4 instead of GNOME 2.12 (or whatever).

So: GIVE GNOME3 SOME TIME, and view GNOME releases with a fresh eye. GNOME 3.8 might rock your world, and the 6-mo release cycle means changes happen faster.

2) I think if you asked the average slashdot reader, they would like to think they are more "open to change" than the average citizen. In fact, I find the entire *nix culture extremely resistant to change, automatically viewing change they don't understand as "change for change's sake". In a way, its sort of unique and cool.... most of the western world is swept up in a progressivist notion of time, always viewing the future as "better" than the best. In contrast, *nix culture often has a distinct note of Indian-style views of time: the gods used to walk the earth, and since then, its mostly been decay. The downside is that its not a very fun community to develop UIs for: instead of focusing on "what's gained", people pull out flamethrowers immediately at the slightest hint of something being lost. CHANGE USUALLY REQUIRES LOSS because DESIGN IS BALANCE. Sometimes the balance is wrong, and sometimes tradeoffs are made when they needn't have been. I think just like GNOME 1.x to GNOME 2, sometimes the first-couple-passes you lose more than you needed to, and this gets balanced out over time.

As a bystander to GNOME 3, I see many ways they could achieve their goals while minimizing the (very real) losses hackers are experiencing whe

What do you mean assumtions?

[dutchwhizzman]

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.

Re:Extensions

[cfalcon]

What the fuck is a static workspaces extension?

Fucking shit the last time I had to grab tinyturdware in order to have a useable GUI, it was before Win95. Now I need a list of downloadable crap that ONLY EXISTS BECAUSE THE BASELINE SUCKS ASS, and I don't even know the list. Maybe there's something to browse?

Whatever, fuck it, and if you defend it, fuck you too. The sheer attitude of the devs is so hard to explain. It's like, they build it for some lowest common denominator that doesn't even exist, and then if you don't like that you must be some kind of problem case so go get a dumb extension? I guess it's good that they have those now, when I left that GUI they sure as shit didn't, they just had a bunch of goddamned attitude.

Fuck it. Just fuck it. GNOME is a lost fucking cause until it gets forked by devs that don't have their heads so far up their asses that they are topologically equivalent to a fucking klein bottle.