Slashdot Mirror
GNOME 3 Winning Back Users
Mcusanelli writes: GNOME 3, the open source desktop environment for Linux systems that once earned a lot of ire, is receiving newfound praise for the maturity of GNOME Shell and other improvements. The recent release of version 3.14 capped off a series of updates that have gone a long way toward resolving users' problems and addressing complaints. One of the big pieces was the addition of "Classic mode" in 3.8, which got it into RHEL 7, and Debian is switching back as well.
While many Debian users dislike GNOME, Debian developers have always had a strange attraction to GNOME, and that goes beyond the little cabal that was hellbent on making systemd the only option. Maybe it is just intertia from the days when GNOME had a more palpable connection to GNU. Had the larger community of developers not been really keen on having GNOME as the desktop, that small group would not have been able to push systemd through so easily.
No matter what Gnome does, systemd is still driving people away from Linux and toward other unices. Debian will eventually be a fringe distro.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Look slashdot: If you don't like something stop being whiny luddite bitches and fix it. That's what open source is about.
And while you're at it stop trashing good work that's going on in other projects - even if you don't agree with the direction it's going in.
Nice to see the primary article admit that the launch was immature I guess.
Once again, the media around Gnome seems to display tone-deafness. The third article gave not a single specific other than Linus uses it though he still has problems. The first article lists all the "improvements" that are supposed to lure me back into the fold. Let's see how they stack up.
FTFA:
1) Classic mode offers "enough familiarity" -- at this point XFCE does what I need it to do. I don't need to use Gnome's idea of how the "old folks" used to work. I heard enough times that "classic" was going to die anyway -- too much risk in switching to something with no clear future.
2) "Weather app" -- okay. Yeah that increases my productivity!
3) Evince has less interface -- great. You guys do realize it was the LACK OF CONTROLS on your apps that drove me away, right?
4) Multitouch support -- worthless to me, no touch interfaces, don't want them.
5) Photo app gained support for Google accounts -- so it reached feature parity with my smartphone. Yay!
6) "Captive portal handling" -- this was an actual problem? I don't recall every failing in that task.
Are you kidding me? That adds up to a lot of shined poo.
Neither article answered a single question I actually would have:
Can I configure it simply without third party plugins?
Can I kill the hot corners? In fact, the whole "Fisher Price Activities" screen?
Can I set unchangable defaults on the launcher instead of it deciding incorrectly what I think is important.
Can I change the terminal and screen layout so my 30" monitor is not trying to make one huge xterm all the time?
Can I get a "heads up display" of my multiple desktops that I don't have to cycle through buttons or move the mouse to see?
Does the terminal launcher continue to assume I need just one terminal and unhelpfully bring up the last instance when I actually wanted a new one?
Does the file browser do something sane finally?
Do I still have to have a global menu?
Can I have focus follows the fricking mouse please? I have a huge legacy program that won't work if this doesn't and I am not rewriting it.
Nope. I don't see a lot of evidence from the articles that it is worth my time to come back. Gnome's new design was for intro users who wanted lots of pizzaz. They were VERY clear about how my problems were because I knew nothing about how I should use the computer. The problem is, I know what jobs I am trying to do, and Gnome just didn't work.
Gnome 3 may be getting better... and I do think that many of the their engineering decissions were addressing real needs even if I personally would have preferred addressing them differently. But I still don't care for the UI and I can NEVER forgive Gnome for the way they pulled the rug out under my workflow. I had something that worked, that was well tuned to my needs, and these self-righteous ASSHOLES just plain simply and utterly BROKE it. For a year and a half after Gnome 3 went into Fedora I stayed with Gnome 2 by not upgrading my system, but I needed up-to-date apps, security fixes, etc. I did give Gnome 3 a chance... but aside from hating the UI it was missing features I needed and worse, at the time it was unstable on the graphics in my laptop! For a while I ended up using Xfce, which is ok but getting rather stale, then I switched to MATE which I'm still using now.
But the real point of this message is this... by breaking my desktop the Gnome people cost me hundreds of hours of lost productivity, and the same was probably true for tens of thousands of other Linux desktop users, so we're talking about millions of lost hour of productivity, amounting to probably several billion dollars. The sheer arrogance of this is staggering to me. Linus never did anything like this, it was always a principle of Linux development not to break userland exactly for this reason. Yeah, Gnome is "only UI", but it isn't as easy as just switching some habits... people have developed workflows around their UIs, so it amounts to the same thing... breakage.
So I'll never forgive Gnome, I'll never trust my productivity to them again. And I'm that many other Linux desktop uses feel the same way... although most of us are techies, we want to work, not wrestle with our desktop UI. I suspect this debacle has been a massive setback for Linux on the desktop. I'm as hardcore an open source you'll find, I haven't run a closed-source OS in over 20 years, but I was almost ready to throw in the towel and install Windows during the height of this!
Gnome's reduction of customizability began in the early millennium when it partnered with some large companies who had carried out formal UI studies and found that for the vast majority of users, options only confuse them. Yes, power users like being able to tweak everything, but there are already a number of *nix graphical interfaces for nerds, and why shouldn't ordinary people get a desktop for them too?
Quite. I really don't get why folk need to hate on someone else's user interface. If it's not for you, move on: the diversity of Linux is a strength, not something to get angry about.
It might be an unpopular view, but I really, really like Unity, for example. It fits in with my workflow and I forget it's there - just what should happen with a desktop environment. It also works well for my mother-in-law, my father and my wife: none of them are computer literate and they enjoy its simplicity.
I've been looking again at Gnome 3 and I also can see its appeal. The way it handles multiple desktops is great, for example, and some of the default apps superficially appear to be excellent. It might not be for everyone, but it has its niche. I might yet be persuaded.
Similarly, I can see the appeal of XFCE, KDE and LWM. They're not for me, but I can understand why people like them. Sometimes you need customisability (KDE) or something that doesn't need loads of RAM or hardware-enabled graphics acceleration (XFCE/LWM). If they work for you, then great.
Why the negativity? I know what I don't like, and I have very little interest in hearing what you don't like; what interests me is the chance of discovering the good stuff out there that I don't yet know about.
Linux sheeple only like familiar things. Want security blanket! Made of penguin wool! Gimmee me precioussss!!
GNOME 3, bad.
Slashdot Beta, bad.
systemd, bad.
Windows 8, bad.
Unity, bad.
PulseAudio, bad.
Wayland, bad...
You know, AC has a point there. It seems that every slightly larger framework coming to Linux gets opposed. To me the funniest part is that many of the opponents do not even seem to precisely know why they are opposing the thing, they just quickly learn to robotically chant the same thing than everyone else. I mean, there are still people who are against Unity because "it is a mobile UI". That just shows that they have never used it, at all.
The interesting trend is that it seems to take losing users/slow adoption in droves and mass rioting to get the ball rolling.
Both gnome 3 and windows 8 have seen their user bases outright revolt over their UI changes, and both largely ignored it as "people hate change but they'll learn to love it" until numbers started actually dropping significantly and people started leaving.
You could say the same with slashdot beta. It took mass protests and the creation of an alternate site for dice to accept that people didn't like what they were doing and wern't going to learn to like it.
This all seems to reflect a growing mentality of "this is what the users want, we just have to wait until they realize it" and a kind of egotistical "we did everything right, so they must be wrong" attitude.
If you have to go though all this mess just to get rid of Systemd then why don't you just move to Systemd? Com on, at the end of the day it's just an init system; it's not like it's the end of the world. It's not really that important, yes really.
You can go out of your way to not use a particular init system but you can't spend five minutes learning grammar?
Priorities.