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Designer Jon McCann: "More Optimistic About GNOME Than In a Long Time"

Posted by timothy on from the hoping-to-love-it-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In an extensive interview with derStandard.at, GNOME designer Jon McCann shares his thoughts about all the criticism GNOME 3 currently faces and why he doesn't think at all that GNOME is in a crisis. He also talks about the current plans for GNOME OS and explains why he thinks that Linux distributions should rethink their purpose."

5 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. No, seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Gnome 3 has issues, and the criticisim is legitimate. Why does it always have to look like that? At this point Windows 8 looks easier to customize than Gnome 3.

    1. Re:No, seriously by postbigbang · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm using Cinammon, too, but my teeth are grinding. KDE is starting to look attractive again, although she's put some weight on.

      --
      ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
    2. Re:No, seriously by kav2k · · Score: 5, Interesting

      For me, it's not about what it is. It is about what it refuses to be.

      Gnome 3 cut away a lot of sensible Gnome 2 functionality due to developers' own vision of what is right. And any pleas to bring it back are slammed.

      Nautilus: a click on a filename does not put it into rename mode. Something Windows and OS X have, and Nautilus had. WONTFIX: it helps prevent user errors.
      Nautilus: there are no more user-assignable emblems on files. WONTFIX: Come on, who uses THAT?
      Gnome-screensaver: clearly, actually having a screensaver is preposterous. WONTFIX.

      Those may seem like small gimmicks, but they pile on, and leave a sour taste by themselves. But the worst part is their treatment by the developer team. They don't want extensive configuration, they want the one and only paradigm of what is "right".

    3. Re:No, seriously by marsu_k · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'd hate to turn this to another Gnome vs. KDE wankfest... but hey, this is slashdot, what else are we here for?

      When KDE4 was released, it was bad. Really a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I migrated from 3.5.x around 4.2 and it was barely usable even then. And I hated Dolphin initially with a passion, thank $DEITY Konqueror was still around. But as new releases kept coming, they kept improving at a steady pace; and now at 4.9, I think Dolphin is my favourite file manager to date. If they took away the split-screen mode, I'd be absolutely infuriated. So the KDE plan seems to be, at least in retrospect, make a new version with some very radical changes, then keep improving on that and adding new features. The Gnome plan seems to be similar, except instead of adding new features old ones get removed. Perhaps my needs as a user differ from those of Joe Average, but I don't need to think twice which approach I prefer.

      (Having said that, KDE is by no means perfect. Arch offers pretty much a vanilla version of KDE, and some of the defaults are just braindead. They can be changed, but if you don't know what you're looking for, the particular settings might not be that discoverable. But that's for another debate.)

  2. Delusional or paid by Apple by goruka · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Either Gnome 3 developers are delusional, or being paid by Apple to screw the open source desktops on purpuse. How, otherwise, did Gnome and Ubuntu fall from the top, while on the peak of success?
    Also, I can understand Ubuntu because the leader drops a lot of $$ on it, but Gnome? I would have thought Gnome was a community project influenced by the community, but if delusional people (and I mean delusional because they state they target laptops, yet make an OS for tablets) is running the project, something must have gone wrong somewhere.