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GNOME 3.14 Released
An anonymous reader writes "GNOME 3.14 was released today and it includes some interesting changes such as re-worked default theme, multi-touch gestures for both the system and applications, and new animations. Information including details on all the new features can be found here."
Most of the devs are still hte same people who made GNOME 2. There are no 'hipsters'. Let me add this little tidbit: SLED/SLES changed their default DE to GNOME. It's right there in the GNOME press release. You know why? Because more people are using GNOME than KDE. Here is something else, according to some folks within suse, opensuse also has more GNOME 3 users than other DEs, but they decided not to piss anybody off and didn't change the default. GNOME now has a full sweep of all the major distro except Ubuntu. Basically, people are finding that more poeple use GNOME than anything else on at least SLED/SLES and opensuse.
And yet Linux desktop usage is the lowest in 2014 that it has been since 2004. Congratulations on winning the DE war and enjoy your ever dwindling market.
Is it a failure, or is it just that you don't like it? A lot of people use Gnome 3 every day on all kinds of desktops and laptops. Yes it's different and if you want Gnome 2 you will have to look at something like Mate or Xfce. But a lot of people use it and like it.
I build Linux embedded systems since 15 years ago, and in each single project there was an specifically developed application to start, monitor, spread events, and stop applications in an dependencies scheduled timing when different events occurs (like electrical signal change, device detection or removal, etc...). Init V design can't be used to do that without a incredibly hard work, and a complete nightmare regarding maintenance.
Systemd solve in an acceptable (and now accepted) way a lot of basic but hard problems on dynamic systems. Yes it is more complex than init V, because it solve problems that init V it completely unable to deal with. The actual big problem is that most users don't understand how complex it is today to maintain a modern distribution where the same users expect that everything is magically dynamic and fast. The crude reality is that init V was simply never designed to be dynamic and fast.
Now systemd is not already perfect and probably need some improvement in some area (like an ACID compliant log for example). But this is an important achievement, so don't ignore it, because it will be everywhere in a few years. And if something really bad will be found to be enough the kill the systemd project, be certain that his replacement project will keep a lot of his features and will still be far more complex than init V.
The init V days are counted since the upstart project proved some of his goals, almost exactly like the static /dev days was counted when devfs proved some of his goals. Finally udev replaced static /dev and devfs. Now systemd is on track to replace init V and upstart.