It's a good thing you are an anonymous coward, because you know that this is just slander. The executive director answers to the board. She can't spend money without the board approving it. The board also does not take a hand in technical matters, we are a support platform for GNOME.
Karen Sandler has a political agenda, it's called Free Software. It aligns with GNOME which isalso a GNU project
I work for the GNOME Foundation - yes, the outreach program took funds out of the general funds. But this was really a problem with scaling. A lot of organizations joined very rapidly and they were all paying at different times. To normalize the payments, they had to take money from the general fund because after all the interns need to be paid.
More efforts needs to be made to make sure that organizations pay on time and do not miss payments. Some of these organizations like say the Python foundation are non-profits and it takes time and effort. Once the payments have been paid, we are going to be okay.
You need to stop thinking about 'OPW' or women or whatever. Just think a program that gave out money to interns became very popular very fast and there wasn't enough buffer to make sure that we can pay everyone on a timely manner. Basically, we now have to do garbage collection to get the lost funds back.
I don't think we're saying there is always only one way. But in a lot of cases, you generally want the correct thing. For instance, when you plug in your monitor in your laptop, you generally expect the correct behavior right? Having options that control at 5pm, you want your desktop extended instead of a dual session screen is kind of silly. But there are a lot of people who revel in these kind of things because there is some kind of technical elitism involved in being able to do that because the other OS's can't. I'm projecting a little, but not by much.
You cannot have a behavior infinitely selectable by the user. In fact there are a number of reasons for this:
1) more options, more documentation required to maintain them - plus you need to maintain them in the code base
2) in a corporate setting, you need to train people to understand each of these behavior.
3) Debugging issues where people have gotten themselves in trouble because they have inadvertently added a checkbox to something that completely confused them. This will happen regardless of the competency of the user.
4) more options the more that things can go wrong, the more QA required to make sure things don't break.
Certainly in cases where data is involved GNOME and like any other operating system will do it's utter best to make sure that no data is lost. That interaction will always be as simple as possible. For instance, we had some support for md-raid in GNOME disks that was removed recently because we could not guarantee a good success. Many people criticized it in knee jerk fashion because they simplified the issue down to "GNOME is removing features". It doesn't even matter what the "feature" is, it fits a story.
In any case, you have a choice between two poles, one tends to be minimal and then the other moving more towards flexibility and tons in between. Desktop is a big tent and there is room for everyone. What GNOME is doing is interesting and cutting edge IMHO. I enjoy working in GNOME.
I've been thinking more about this and have to say, one of your weaker arguments. Your argument seems to be that extensions suck, but might suck less in the future. It sounds like you agree that extensions are inferior to checkboxes for the user when handling preferences but that the trade off for developer ease is worth it. The issue being code complexity and testing. But you then write about how short the extensions are and that they are code reviewed. So there is a trivial amount of complexity, honestly most of the code is already there it is just difficult to set the preference. And your users want the testing. Extensions suck because they aren't tested, they interfere with each other, they break; but then you say we should try them if we don't like stock.
So as I'm still having my coffee this is less lucid then I would like; but which is it? Is this a tiny bit of code that Gnome developers just can't bother adding or is it truly complex, in which case we can expect extensions to be a mess and make the entire system a tottering mess?
Please tell me that your last line about users abandoning Gnome if you add preferences was a joke or a throw away line. Specious argument, and while easy to deflate I'd rather not take the time. If you have your "perfect defaults" no one would even have to see that you had preferences anyway. And actually maybe not specious, I don't think it is even remotely plausible, everyone has been screaming for preferences.
Well extensions just give people the option to extend your desktop. What they write isn't necessary something that is going to be useful to everyone. The code can either be very complex or very simple, it just depends on what you are doing. For instance, you could write an extension that by pressing F3, will open up two nautilus windows side by side so that you can do file copying or something. That might not be very hard to do at all. There might be other things that might be more complex like wobbly windows or something.
We want testing too. In fact we have gnome-continuous which is a continuous integrated build server that will immediately check if something is broken when checked into git. There is a QA team that has spun up that will use automatic testing to test apps both GUI and otherwise, plus unit tests. Plus some manual tests. Hopefully, we'll be able to apply the manual tests to extensions so that we can make sure that they all work for say the next version.
There is however now way to test every combination of extensions currently. Certainly, nobody is working on that. But then nobody is doing that for mozilla either, right?
I don't see a ton of requests for preferences, at least nothing specific. It's more generic "we want more options!" but nothing really specific. Most of the time, you want sane defaults that you don't need to tweak. I don't know if I am a good sample but since I am a hardcore terminal user, I don't really demand a lot from my desktop environment. My workflow works perfectly fine with GNOME, I don't tweak anything. I don't know what kind of options people are talking. If you talk about the options that you find in KDE or somewhere else, it's always an option because a) you can't decide what is the correct behavior so you decide to allow both paths 2) there is a bug that is outside the control of the project and thus you create an option to paper over the problem by fixing it in the desktop 3) there is an honest user tweakable option.
Sometimes the GNOME mentality goes a little too far and that it is not always possible to do something correct for most cases and in which case adding a option should be considered. I've had many discussions internally about some of them and try to nudge them in that direction. We're an intractable bunch at times so you need to use subtlety by asking questions.
The big requests have been about moving tweak tool into the settings which so far we haven't done. There might be a couple things in tweak tool that might be worth putting into settings, but for the most part they should stay in tweak tool.
Yes, so basically we need to figure out from teh toolkit level how to make this happen and drive a standard so that any app that uses a toolkit will automatically figure out how to save all that so then session saving then works for all apps except maybe those old apps from the 90s.
Anything added to the web site is code reviewed for attack vectors. Most of the extensions are fairly simple and easy to write. The extension I wrote to put a lockscreen on the topbar was all of 20 lines.
Yes, only online because of attack vectors as you said earlier.
We should see some improvements, some of the breakages come from the fact that gnome-shell is in active development and so some times extemsopms break because the code is getting refactored. In the past, we were not able to put out an image for extension writers to test. Now we have both a continuous integration build that extension writers can literally test everyday for breakage and also a QA team is spinning up so that we can at least check the popular extensions and bug extension writers to port. Once gnome-shell becomes more stable extension breakage will happen less.
Putting in prefs and checkboxes also increase code complexity as that is just more than you have to test and secondly the behaviour should be correct the first time without having to modify the behaviour. Basically it should do the right thing 99% of the time. If there are cases that it doesn't work that way then agree a preference should be put or if there something that a user does need a choice due to hardware or some behaviour.
The irony is that if created a bunch of preferences, a number of you will abandon the platform because it is bloated and move to i3 or awesome or something perceivably "light" like XFCE.
Session saving is a hard problem and it requires apps to participate. Since it was never working correctly, it was removed so a better way could be done. But sometimes those things take awhile.
Why not use http://extensions.gnome.org/ and then you can probably add the stuff you need to make it more what you are used to. There is also a classic mode which tries to mimic GNOME 2. Of course, there is always Mate.:)
Yeah, I agree. It would have been a bad bet to even have dated her too because
a) integrity
b) if you're dating, that could lead to favoritism, contributing to a hostile work environment
No, that was not the girl for you anyways, especially if she makes such bad decisions.
It's because some of them believe that a computer is an extension of themselves and so they like to make the computer work to their workflow or whatever. So, GNOME 3 doesn't really do that you have to adopt to the workflow that it is optimized for. If you of that mindset then, yes, indeed it will be hard to get used to GNOME 3.
That doesn't make GNOME 3 bad or anything, but that's why you get these comments. But I would say that there should be one projects that breaks the status quo and lead with new ideas instead of trying to conform to just technical FOSS people.
Democrats are notorious for election fraud? Oh man, you must have drank some of the Republican koolaid.
In any case, I didn't say Democrats were trustworthy I said they were less corrupt. One doesn't mean the other.
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This has nothing to do with the Executive Director. I am a board member.
It's a good thing you are an anonymous coward, because you know that this is just slander. The executive director answers to the board. She can't spend money without the board approving it. The board also does not take a hand in technical matters, we are a support platform for GNOME. Karen Sandler has a political agenda, it's called Free Software. It aligns with GNOME which isalso a GNU project
I work for the GNOME Foundation - yes, the outreach program took funds out of the general funds. But this was really a problem with scaling. A lot of organizations joined very rapidly and they were all paying at different times. To normalize the payments, they had to take money from the general fund because after all the interns need to be paid. More efforts needs to be made to make sure that organizations pay on time and do not miss payments. Some of these organizations like say the Python foundation are non-profits and it takes time and effort. Once the payments have been paid, we are going to be okay. You need to stop thinking about 'OPW' or women or whatever. Just think a program that gave out money to interns became very popular very fast and there wasn't enough buffer to make sure that we can pay everyone on a timely manner. Basically, we now have to do garbage collection to get the lost funds back.
Hey, I'm here, been part of the project since 1997 and I am part of the GNOME Foundation.
You cannot have a behavior infinitely selectable by the user. In fact there are a number of reasons for this:
1) more options, more documentation required to maintain them - plus you need to maintain them in the code base 2) in a corporate setting, you need to train people to understand each of these behavior. 3) Debugging issues where people have gotten themselves in trouble because they have inadvertently added a checkbox to something that completely confused them. This will happen regardless of the competency of the user. 4) more options the more that things can go wrong, the more QA required to make sure things don't break.
Certainly in cases where data is involved GNOME and like any other operating system will do it's utter best to make sure that no data is lost. That interaction will always be as simple as possible. For instance, we had some support for md-raid in GNOME disks that was removed recently because we could not guarantee a good success. Many people criticized it in knee jerk fashion because they simplified the issue down to "GNOME is removing features". It doesn't even matter what the "feature" is, it fits a story.
In any case, you have a choice between two poles, one tends to be minimal and then the other moving more towards flexibility and tons in between. Desktop is a big tent and there is room for everyone. What GNOME is doing is interesting and cutting edge IMHO. I enjoy working in GNOME.
Hopefully, you will like this new release better.
I've been thinking more about this and have to say, one of your weaker arguments. Your argument seems to be that extensions suck, but might suck less in the future. It sounds like you agree that extensions are inferior to checkboxes for the user when handling preferences but that the trade off for developer ease is worth it. The issue being code complexity and testing. But you then write about how short the extensions are and that they are code reviewed. So there is a trivial amount of complexity, honestly most of the code is already there it is just difficult to set the preference. And your users want the testing. Extensions suck because they aren't tested, they interfere with each other, they break; but then you say we should try them if we don't like stock. So as I'm still having my coffee this is less lucid then I would like; but which is it? Is this a tiny bit of code that Gnome developers just can't bother adding or is it truly complex, in which case we can expect extensions to be a mess and make the entire system a tottering mess? Please tell me that your last line about users abandoning Gnome if you add preferences was a joke or a throw away line. Specious argument, and while easy to deflate I'd rather not take the time. If you have your "perfect defaults" no one would even have to see that you had preferences anyway. And actually maybe not specious, I don't think it is even remotely plausible, everyone has been screaming for preferences.
Well extensions just give people the option to extend your desktop. What they write isn't necessary something that is going to be useful to everyone. The code can either be very complex or very simple, it just depends on what you are doing. For instance, you could write an extension that by pressing F3, will open up two nautilus windows side by side so that you can do file copying or something. That might not be very hard to do at all. There might be other things that might be more complex like wobbly windows or something.
We want testing too. In fact we have gnome-continuous which is a continuous integrated build server that will immediately check if something is broken when checked into git. There is a QA team that has spun up that will use automatic testing to test apps both GUI and otherwise, plus unit tests. Plus some manual tests. Hopefully, we'll be able to apply the manual tests to extensions so that we can make sure that they all work for say the next version.
There is however now way to test every combination of extensions currently. Certainly, nobody is working on that. But then nobody is doing that for mozilla either, right?
I don't see a ton of requests for preferences, at least nothing specific. It's more generic "we want more options!" but nothing really specific. Most of the time, you want sane defaults that you don't need to tweak. I don't know if I am a good sample but since I am a hardcore terminal user, I don't really demand a lot from my desktop environment. My workflow works perfectly fine with GNOME, I don't tweak anything. I don't know what kind of options people are talking. If you talk about the options that you find in KDE or somewhere else, it's always an option because a) you can't decide what is the correct behavior so you decide to allow both paths 2) there is a bug that is outside the control of the project and thus you create an option to paper over the problem by fixing it in the desktop 3) there is an honest user tweakable option.
Sometimes the GNOME mentality goes a little too far and that it is not always possible to do something correct for most cases and in which case adding a option should be considered. I've had many discussions internally about some of them and try to nudge them in that direction. We're an intractable bunch at times so you need to use subtlety by asking questions.
The big requests have been about moving tweak tool into the settings which so far we haven't done. There might be a couple things in tweak tool that might be worth putting into settings, but for the most part they should stay in tweak tool.
Yes, so basically we need to figure out from teh toolkit level how to make this happen and drive a standard so that any app that uses a toolkit will automatically figure out how to save all that so then session saving then works for all apps except maybe those old apps from the 90s.
Putting in prefs and checkboxes also increase code complexity as that is just more than you have to test and secondly the behaviour should be correct the first time without having to modify the behaviour. Basically it should do the right thing 99% of the time. If there are cases that it doesn't work that way then agree a preference should be put or if there something that a user does need a choice due to hardware or some behaviour.
The irony is that if created a bunch of preferences, a number of you will abandon the platform because it is bloated and move to i3 or awesome or something perceivably "light" like XFCE.
I don't really care, it was more of a bemused comment. :)
It doesn't work for anyone properly, that was the point. If you have a featuer that is unreliable, it's not really much of a feature.
Session saving is a hard problem and it requires apps to participate. Since it was never working correctly, it was removed so a better way could be done. But sometimes those things take awhile.
Thanks!
Jezus, I've been on this site since Malda was still using it as a tab on his website. It took them this long to actually accept a submission of mine.
Why not use http://extensions.gnome.org/ and then you can probably add the stuff you need to make it more what you are used to. There is also a classic mode which tries to mimic GNOME 2. Of course, there is always Mate. :)
Looks like it all worked out for the best then!
:) Well, I thought you were not married at the time,right? :)
Yeah, I agree. It would have been a bad bet to even have dated her too because a) integrity b) if you're dating, that could lead to favoritism, contributing to a hostile work environment No, that was not the girl for you anyways, especially if she makes such bad decisions.
She was wrong to ask you on a date as a subordinate. Your position was removed because the whole relationship became really awkward.
Some folks hated GNOME 2 for the same reason. :-) But it evolved and got better.
It's because some of them believe that a computer is an extension of themselves and so they like to make the computer work to their workflow or whatever. So, GNOME 3 doesn't really do that you have to adopt to the workflow that it is optimized for. If you of that mindset then, yes, indeed it will be hard to get used to GNOME 3. That doesn't make GNOME 3 bad or anything, but that's why you get these comments. But I would say that there should be one projects that breaks the status quo and lead with new ideas instead of trying to conform to just technical FOSS people.
Democrats are notorious for election fraud? Oh man, you must have drank some of the Republican koolaid. In any case, I didn't say Democrats were trustworthy I said they were less corrupt. One doesn't mean the other.
I'm not a Democrat. I vote in my interest and voting Republican isn't it.
It's a bit cynical to have this world view. The corruption that you see here is nothing compared to some of the places I've been.
Just like these car makers probably won't like GNOME 3.