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.
Personally I still like KDE's way of thinking about things, that you are far better off creating multiple workspaces all based on a common desktop environment that suit different types of hardware (Desktop, Netbook and future touch interfaces) rather than creating a monolithic interface that tries to bridge across all types of hardware it might be used on.
In any case anything is better than Unity and they both beat the rubbish Windows 8 interface.
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.
But if it still tries to force someone else's idea of how a desktop should behave I doubt that I will move back. Really, why do Gnome developers find it so hard to allow users to change things to their likings anyway?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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.
There really is no need to use Gnome (or KDE) on Debian. I have used it with fvwm for more than a decade now, no problems. This is not Windows, you know, where you are tied to whatever broken Window-Manager the manufacturer forces you to use.
As to Debian, itself, I fear this might just be more bad strategic technical decisions that follow from the systemd disaster.The current Debian technical committee has its head up its backside. No, I do not think they have been bought, but I do think they have been successfully manipulated from the outside. Fortunately, my Linux desktop will look&feel just the same on Gentoo, when systemd-free Debian eventually will run out of support.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Stop sucking. I'm sitting on a bucket load of mod points and I have ads disabled.
The problems:
Standard Gnome 3 is desktop/power user hostile.
Mate and Cinnamon don't do touch screens.
Cinnamon depends on Gnome 3
Because of it's Gnome 2 underpinnings, Mate does not scale well, but I am sure they can add to the final product.
Reform the Gnome organization, giving the Cinnamon and Mate devs a good voice in the final product.
BTW, I am using Cinnamon right now.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
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!
Slashdot has ads? I never noticed.
In this age of widescreen LCDs, the vertical space is limited. Yet, Gnome seems to be wasting it with not just one, but two horizontal panels. Wouldn't it make more sense to make them vertical?
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.
no
Please login to access my lawn
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.
yes
The Gnome Project's true value is as a cautionary tale about knowing your user base. The Gnome foundation badly misjudged who would use their stuff and were so sure that they'd tap into millions of normal users that they didn't mind being really insulting to the users they lost in the process.
Today's articles seem to admit they are not reaching "normal users doing things normal users do" and since they need some sort of user base back, they must appeal to the ones they drove away. Really, it's right there in the titles: "How GNOME 3.14 is winning back disillusioned Linux users" and "Open Source GNOME 3 Desktop Environment Wins Back Fans."
I decided to post just to point out that the "features" that are supposed to win their users back are superficial at best and they do even get close to the core of their problems.
Reading tip 101: Typically the last thing in a list occupies that position because it is generally not as important to the main argument as what came before.
As a fellow gentoo user who is also trying to avoid systemd, we've got a hell of a fight before us.
Systemd wants to be it's own platform and it's snaking it's way into everything. Running a non-systemd system on gentoo, even where openrc is the default and systemd is just an alternative, is becoming a pain. I've had to rejuggle packages and use the blacklist for the first time in many years because (McBain voice) THE USE FLAGS, THEY DO NOTHING!
As more and more stuff adds dependencies on the systemd virus, it's just gonna get worse.
Our only hope is that systemd implodes and everything just goes back to the way it was.
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.
Yeah, who wants to be one of those losers that communicate properly. Rules are for morons, right?
Your original comment didn't make you an idiot. Your last one definitely did.
The problem imo is specifically that it's not just an init system. It's morphing into it's own thing that wants to take over all routine system behaviour, and the attitude of the devs is not encouraging (too lazy to find the link, but an oft quoted comment regarding log file corruption illustrates this quite well).
You say that as if it's a bad thing that stuff can be made to work well together if it's developed together.
Linux (at least in my opinion) is all about choice. Don't like the way something works, use something else or write your own. Systemd is becoming a huge chunk that can't easily be swapped out for something else. I'm really against that.
I have not tested but it looks like you can swap it out for something else on at least Debian:
https://packages.debian.org/je...
And importance is relative. If you just want a functioning system, I agree that none of this is really that important and I'd probably just use ubuntu or mint or hell just windows or mac. I use gentoo specifically because I like my system "just so". Most people probably fall somewhere in between these points, with some past where they care about systemd and some not. I think this is perfectly healthy. If no one cared about init systems or boot loaders, no one would be developing them!
Indeed.
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.
It seems to be really good PR actually... Everyone says "Windows 10 is really good", and quietly ignoring the "...because they ripped out all the crap Windows 8 introduced, leaving it identical to Windows 7" bit. :)
To be honest, I don't really buy the "people hate change" thing - sure, some people hate change, but a lot of the time changes are good. Change for the sake of change is often bad, but a lot of change doesn't fit into that category and actually improves things. From my perspective, I think Gnome 3's UI is pretty good - I really like the fundamental design. What I dislike about Gnome 3 isn't the basic design, its that they seem to think that making everyone use dconf is more "user friendly" than providing a proper configuration UI that actually lets you.. uhm.. configure it.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
You say that as if it's a bad thing that stuff can be made to work well together if it's developed together.
It's a trade-off. Mac, and to some degree Windows, benefit greatly from tight integration, but it comes at the cost of flexibility. The preference of flexibility over user friendliness and even functionality was what drew me to Linux and specifically Gentoo in the first place.
Systemd is probably not a terrible idea by itself, it just goes against the traditional linux mindset, which is probably why it's hitting so much resistance from people like me who bought into that mindset more so than the functioning system.
I had no idea, mostly because I don't care about ads, but I run requestpolicy because, I consider the whole mode of operation on the web these days a bit like if every time you ran into a person you knew with a group of their random friends who you may or may not have met before, you went and immediately gave oral sex to each person in the group every time.
If they want me to see ads, they should host them on the same site I wanted to load, otherwise I am not going to see it. Sorry I don't trust that every affiliate site that every site I go to decides to allow to accept money to link is "clean enough to raw dog"
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The way in which systemd components "work together" is through a series of interfaces that inherit little of the Unix tradition, and a lot of people would prefer to keep that Unix tradition. Systemd's command-line arguments are weirdly phrased, documentation is not a priority for systemd developers at this time so many manuals and HOWTOs are already out of date, logging is drastically different from how it used to be, and perfectly reasonable technologies that people have long trained in such as cron are being removed from the systemd because Lennart Poettering wants his init system to cover all that functionality to. It's a mess.
While Debian ostensibly offers other init systems, it is really only suitable for certain types of installations like headless servers. Installing graphical applications under Debian is now likely to require systemd. Even the GIMP now pulls in systemd because it depends on dbus, and the Debian maintainers have made systemd a dbus dependency.
I have not tested but it looks like you can swap it out for something else on at least Debian: https://packages.debian.org/je... [debian.org]
The problem is likely the same as on gentoo. Sure you don't have to install systemd, but a shit tonne of stuff will depend on it, or have dependencies that depend on it. I imagine the situation will be far worse on binary based distros as they tend to pull in a shit tonne of libraries and sometimes actual programs because of some minor but tightly coupled feature that didn't warrant a patch or a -non-<whatever> version. As I said in a prior post, on gentoo I had to straight up blacklist the systemd package and rely on portage failing because telling everything not to compile with systemd support isn't enough!
Slackware ditched gnome because it became too big of a pain to include it without including systemd.
The whole thing is just very anti-linux imo.
So, might as well use "her's" and "he's". Otherwise, you're being inconsistent and "unnatural". And remember to perfectly switch back to the consensus-grammar when not communicating in a casual context.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.