Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Last GUADEC?

Posted by Soulskill on from the indiana-jones-and dept.

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."

8 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Its NOT smartphones. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re: Its NOT smartphones. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      What? Let Gnome 2 and 3 coexist in the same world? That's just crazy talk. What would people say if they tried to do that with something like Python? Or even the Linux kernel itself?

    2. Re:Its NOT smartphones. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not sure why this was modded funny. There is more than an element of truth in it. I can't speak from the perspective of a "normal user" since I'm not one. But I can speak from my own.

      Firstly there's GTK. For those not aware, GTK is based on GObject. I've tried using GObject. It may be a very fine object system, and since it's based in C, I imagine that bringing over the runtime is relatively easy, but really it is no fun to use. And by no fun, I mean awful.

      The primary reason is that it's all in C. Actually doing heavyweight dynamic style OO in C (basically like Python or Ruby or Javascript) is possible, but it is very, very verbose. Essentially you have to do vast amounts of stuff by-hand and it means that the program logic ends up being very sparsely interleaved with the heaps of required boilerplate. Not only that but the learning curve is very steep. IIRC Rust is a bit like C with native GObject support, so perhaps that will help things. But at the moment programming in GObject is unpleasant.

      Secondly, frankly the UI is bad. They seem to be determined to abandon the long held principles of heirachal filesystems and the current working directory. Why oh why oh why when I start up a program in $HOME/projects/foo does the file dialog now default to "favourites" which is something not in the heirachy at all, or the last place I was working. This sort of change is completely unnecessary. If normal users don't start from anywhere else but $HOME then ignoring the current directory won't affect them at all. It only hurts power users.

      The thing is, that's just one example. For another example, how many steps does it take to print a document of any sort at 6-up in a GTK program versus the appauling old style dialog like "xpdf"? The answer: lots. Adobe (of all people) proved it was unnecessary by making a really nice system that was simple for all normal stuff, but in the "advanced" box, the GUI options simply added things to an LPR line.

      Examples abound of where GNOME is essentially "simplifying" to the point of making things less simple (how is ignoring $PWD unlike every other system simple?) especially for advanced users. The thing is advanecd users are the ones that hack on it and the ones that go to conferences.

      If they systematically put off all advanced users, then basically it will be nothing but a commercial project. That's fine if they want it but it will kill off any ecosystem.

      Oh and about GLib. A good fraction of the stuff is about providing things like linked lists, resizable arrays, hash tables, essentially all the sort of stuff that's in the STL, except much more verbose, vastly less efficient and not even remotely type safe. And two of those are unnecessary in C if you're prepared to (a) put up with complex macros and (b) have C++ like compile errors.

      And other stuff just seems to be there for the sake of it, like the lexical scanner compared to (e.g. FLEX). They could simply have integrated the FLEX runtime into glib and used that as a scanner. It would have been better documented and have much nicer syntax that way.

      I know people complain about C++ being complex, but once you add on a library the size of GLib, you've made almost a new language and the complexity arguments pretty much vanish at that point.

      Don't get me wrong. For a C library, GLib is very impressive. It allows you to do all sorts of things with C that would otherwise require vast amounts of work and huge amounts of pain. But the problem is it's built on a very low level language and that makes life difficult.

      Oh yeah, where was I. Gnome. One other example I remember from a while back.

      My mum had an old computer. After Windows 98 became untenable, I put ubuntu on it, since she was feircely opposed to spending money on a new computer if the old one worked. Being young and naive I still did family tech support.

      Anyway, it worked pretty well. I hd taught her what a heirachal filesystem was and she was happily able to arrange files in a nice organised manner. Actually

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  2. GUADEC? by bmomjian · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am sure I am not the only one who doesn't know what GUADEC is, and in fact even the event homepage (https://www.guadec.org/) doesn't spell out what it is. It is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference.

  3. Re:They shot themselves in the foot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    LGPL 2.1 vs LGPL 2.1?

  4. I blame removing configurability by zakkie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Gnome 3 was a fuckup, but it started way back, when Havoc Pennington declared that too many options confused users. That was the start of the slippery slope that led us to this scenario. Taking away options completely instead of just offering basic & advanced configuration options was a fucking stupid idea. A desktop or any interface needs to get out of the way and make your day-to-day experience as painless as possible, but Gnome was hijacked by look-at-me designer types with nothing better to do than find ways of breaking shit that worked pretty fucking well. End result? A clusterfuck that nobody wants to use.

  5. Re:They shot themselves in the foot by segedunum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. No by The+Cat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.