The Last GUADEC?

An anonymous reader writes "How can we ensure, together, that this will not be the last GUADEC? Last year, during GUADEC, there was that running joke amongst some participants that this was the last GUADEC. It was, of course, a joke. Everybody was expecting to see each other in Brno, in 2013. One year later, most of those who were joking are not coming to GUADEC. For them, the joke became a reality. People are increasingly leaving the desktop computer to use phones, tablets and services in the cloud. The switch is deeper and quicker than anything we imagined. Projects are also leaving GTK+ for QT. Unity abandoned GTK+, Linus Torvald's Subsurface is switching from GTK+ to Qt. If you spot a GNOME desktop in a conference, chances are that you are dealing with a Red Hat employee. That's it. According to Google Trends, interest in GNOME and GTK+ is soon to be extinct."

Comments

Its NOT smartphones.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome sucks. Its a UI made not for normal users but for the designers imaginary friends.

Re:Its NOT smartphones.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. I know a lot of "normal users" who are just fine with Gnome 3. What I've found is that the problem is not Gnome 3, the problem is that Gnome 2 went away. I think there would have been a much better situation if Gnome 2 had been maintained in parallel with Gnome 3, so that users had been able to have both installed and move freely between them until Gnome 3 was able to fully replace Gnome 2. It was just so unnecessary that we had to rename everything to Mate.

Re:Its NOT smartphones.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a lot of "normal users" who are just fine with Gnome 3.

Lies.

They shot themselves in the foot

[msobkow]

Most people assume GTK+ is a dead end seeing as it's tied so closely to that abortion of a desktop known as Gnome 3.

Re:They shot themselves in the foot

[segedunum]

GTK was dead fifteen years ago, just no one realised it. When you have a toolkit that programmers are supposed to be using pulled out of another project (GIMP) as an emotional response to the license of another toolkit (Qt) you're already on to a loser. You have to win on the software, and producing a core development toolkit for GUI and desktop developers is spectacularly difficult. New features look cool and you have to keep moving things on but there are a spectacular amount of bugs to fix and that takes full-time manpower. Red Hat weren't going to plough lots of developer money into GTK because it made no money for them for the manpower they would have to put in to get it on a par with Qt and other GUI development software. It's not as if they were selling licenses or anything. You can't be emotional. Either free desktop software is good enough to compete or it isn't.

Qt was miles better fifteen years ago, miles better ten years ago, miles better five years ago and the gap has only widened. You throw in the LGPL license now and you have a situation where there is no reason whatsoever you wouldn't use Qt in a Linux based environment.

It's just a pity it has taken us so long and there has been so much blood letting for us to get to a situation where we probably have a de fact standard GUI development path decided upon by natural selection.

Re:They shot themselves in the foot

[serviscope_minor]

well qt has a commercial option?

Well, at this point LGPL 2.1 is a perfectly fine commercial option. Honestly if your lawyers say it isn't then you should probably fire your lawyers and get some new ones. After all, the famously well lawyered Apple seem entirely happy to integrate the LGPL Webkit into their very proprietary operating systems.

Commercial means commercial, not "palatable to ingnorant lawyers" :)

Re:They shot themselves in the foot

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Not a single thing of your rant has anything to do with Qt, so you should be modded off topic, and secondly, yeah, yeah, you fire up your "light" windowmanager, and the minute you have started up a few of those "light" applications, you've lost out to KDE anyway.

Just try loading up KDE with Calligra Words, Rekonqueror and Oklular, and compare that to Libreoffice Writer, Firefox and Adobe Reader together with your window manager of choice. Have fun explaining how the latter is in any way "lighter". :)

Re:They shot themselves in the foot

[Anonymous Coward]

GTK wasn't an "emotional" response to QT, but a practical response. If a license is preventing you (by law) from doing what you need to do, or abiding by the terms of that license would be impractical, then the only remaining option is to do it yourself.

With that understood, there is no reason to bring up "emotions" at all -- unless of course your own perspective is emotional.

Sad, if true

[jandersen]

It is sad, in a way, although not surprising to me.

Sad, because it was once so promising; GNOME was once my absolute favourite desktop, but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them. And then they started removing useful features, upsetting their core community - those who were on Linux because it is OPEN, extremely configurable, very inclusive etc - and the GNOME developers became more and more unapproachable and sectarian. I suppose, in a way they chose to follow their own closed set of ideals and lost their way.

Now I use KDE - it is not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I only need good enough, and KDE is good enough for my purposes.

Re:Sad, if true

[Tom]

but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them.

ditto.

Gnome was very promising once, I even worked on it for a while. But this exactly, there was a point where it turned into a me-too project, where ideas for making things better were shunned in favour of making things familiar, which at that time meant copying windows.

Gnome is a major example of Free Software fucking it up because of bikeshedding and copying instead of innovating.

vala

[samjam]

Shame - vala is a really cool c(+) style language that hides a lot of the glib rot that was too hard to use.

The same trend for the whole PC infrastructure

[maweki]

Looking at Gnome and GTK as an Example for them going extinct specifically is pretty stupid. You see declining trends for microsoft, dell and KDE as well while playing with Google Trends.

Yup Gnome 3 sucks

[DMJC]

It's sad but true, Gnome 3 with it's stupid tablet interface completely sucks. Gnome is trying to double down on fail and it'll lead to complete extinction within a few months. They need to massively reverse course but too much ego will probably prevent it from happening. The Linux desktop has basically shot itself in the foot right when it's finally achieving mainstream gaming success. Personally I'm banking on GNUstep actually getting finished and offering an osx-alike experience on Linux. Gnome was a really nice desktop but by choosing to rush into tablets they've pulled a Microsoft and shot their desktop users in the face. The desktop isn't going anywhere, it's Gnome that's gone away.

Re:Yup Gnome 3 sucks

[dbIII]

It shouldn't take five minutes to find the things that should be on the screen and in your face.

Re:KDE and Gnome are still comparable

[segedunum]

Why should anyone be modded up who is basing the general usage of desktop environments on Google trends?

No

[The Cat]

People are not abandoning the PC to use phones tablets and "services in the cloud." That is propaganda designed to sell you phones, tablets and services in the cloud.

Phones, tablets and services in the cloud will never replace the PC, because a desktop or laptop computer is the proper control form for the human body.

People want a full keyboard, a full-size monitor and a mouse. They don't want to do real work on a 2" x 3" screen.

This "exodus from the PC" is pure bullshit advanced by mobile device companies to get you back on the hardware upgrade treadmill so they can sell you a new device every two years.

Let me say it again: it's BULL. SHIT.

Misdirected problem

[readingaccount]

People are increasingly leaving the desktop computer

No, they aren't.

They are just not buying new ones because they have reached a level where they are good enough for what they do and have no huge motivation for upgrading. That's why the PC market is crumbling, not because people aren't using PCs anymore, but because they are content with what they have on the desktop.

Now I don't get why GNOME is jumping on the Tablet/Smartphone bandwagon when they don't even have to sell anything.

All in all this has turned out to be a fucking disaster, and it's all the GNOME team's fault for being too arrogant to listen to the screams and cries and often well documented problems people had with this new direction. What a fucking mess.

Change your attitude

[pieleric]

As many people have already written, it's not the drive to tablet and phone that is reducing the user community, it's the fact that Gnome has become so bad compared to other DEs that people moved away. The main question is "why has Gnome become so bad?". I'd say it's mostly due to not listening enough to user feedback and lack of good judgment on what is good for the users.

Don't get me wrong. I loved Gnome, used it all the time, even used to send patches for the bugs that were annoying me (actually, I even had SVN commit rights at some points). But I stopped because Gnome 3 was worse than Unity _and_ LXDE, and because developers started to close all my bug reports as WONTFIX or, worse, because the patch would not apply anymore... after 2 years of being ignored.

I'd suggest these changes to all the core Gnome developers:
  * first fix bugs before adding a new feature (or a new app)
  * review and merge as many patches as you get from outside people, as soon as possible (that's how you build a developer community)
  * review the entire interface and especially the fixed/default values so that Gnome is _super_ comfortable to use right out of the box
  * do not ever remove features, and never accept regressions
  * make sure your interface can be used by power users too (yes, that means putting back _some_ configuration options), they are the (future) developers
  * listen a bit to user feedback (that one is difficult because it's typically a very noisy channel, but it's necessary)
  * pick a few known and powerful programming languages, and stick to them for all the core applications. Honestly, just drop Vala: as great as it could be, it's not up to a DE project to develop a new programming language, and almost no one outside of the community knows it. If it was up to me, I'd say, just pick C, C++ and Python.

Keep like this for 3 years, and Gnome will be relevant again.

I'd also suggest to pick 2 or 3 apps and focus on them so much that they are the best for the task among any other competitor. This way, people will have incentive to use Gnome, and all the distributions will make sure these apps and all the dependencies are installed by default and working well. For instance, I'd pick: Evince, Rhythmbox, and Aisleriot.

Google Trends vs Debian "popcon"

[Mathieu Lu]

More reliable than Google-Trends: Debian "popcon", a program that Debian users are offered to install and report their program usage.

http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gnome-shell (40k installed / 20k votes)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xfwm4 (16k installed, 8k votes)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=kde-window-manager (14k installed, 8k votes)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=xserver-xorg (80k installed, 25k votes)

The stats being what they are, you can't really compare the 40k gnome-shell installs with the 16k xfwm4 (gnome-shell is installed by default, which makes the 16k xfwm more impressive, I guess), but you can make some conclusions.

And yeah, I like gnome-shell / Gnome3. Sometimes after a crash (I run debian-experimental packages), I return to fvwm for a few hours, but I always end back onto gnome-shell. "it works", is pleasant to use, and if necessary, there are ways to customize it.

A few months ago, I had forked and published an extension for hiding the top panel. I was surprised of all the feedback and number of users it got. Better yet, someone else stepped up to maintain it and does a great job.

Seriously.. way too many trolls, and most of the rest don't bother to comment.