

Apple's poisonous touch silently kills the GNOMEs of the Linux forest - watchdogtimer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/04/state_of_gnome/

======
senko
Flamebait article with a lot of factual errors:

Article confuses GNOME 3 with GNOME Shell (Linux Mint and Ubuntu both use
GNOME 3 the framework). Both the UI and the framework went through a huge
transition, both arguably hurt the developers and the users.

Nokia's abandonement of GNOME has nothing to do with GNOME 3. SUSE was a KDE
distro from the very start, years ago. Ubuntu not shipping with GNOME 3 the UI
by default is less to do with GNOME Shell and more to do with Ubuntu pushing
their own thing (valid strategy, but not a response to GNOME 3 mess). The only
major distro to react to GNOME 3 disruption is Linux Mint - which had to do so
because _both_ Unity and Shell weren't there yet.

Back to Apple envy and "poisonous touch" - whoever paid attention to what's
going on with GNOME development knows there was (is?) much more Web "envy" (or
rather panic: "it's going to render the desktop obsolete!"). In fact, I'd say
Apple in this case served as an example of an ecosystem that successfully
pushed _against_ the web and obsolesence of desktop (or rather "native") apps.

------
raverbashing
It's not Apple's fault

It's the fault of 'the inmates running the asylum' thinking that visual
gimmicks + removing functionality until the product is lobotomized == User
Experience

And don't give me the BS that Gnome cares about UX, they don't.

How do you know you care about the user? They like you. Sometimes they even
like you enough to give you money.

~~~
knotz
I'm wondering what people do exactly hate so much in Gnome? I'm working right
now in Gnome 3.6. It's not perfect, but it suits me pretty well by being
simple elegant and not in my face.

~~~
omaranto
I recently tried GNOME 3.4 for about a month. I liked it right away: it's
pretty and it's practical. I stopped using it because it slowed down my (old,
granted) computer horribly after a few days (memory leak?). Restarting the
computer made it feel faster again, but I like keeping the machine on all the
time (I usually only restart when there's a kernel update in my distro). I
went back to LXDE and my machine feels so much faster: even freshly started,
before a few days of slowdown, GNOME 3.4 is slower than LXDE, _and_ I use
mostly the same programs on both: chromium, evince, gvim, empathy, totem, etc.

------
midnight_print
The article seems to gather a number of unrelated assumptions and keeps
repeating them until they must be true.

For instance, a statement like "...the radical rewrite that is the GNOME 3
desktop seems to have pleased almost no one." is backed up with _no data at
all_. And that's exactly the problem. Without data, who is anyone to claim
that GNOME is gaining or losing users? Or market share, for that matter.
Personally I love GNOME 3, but what I personally think doesn't matter one bit.

And while I respect Linux (sic) Torvalds as much as anyone, the fact that he
is a kernel hacker means he is as far away from GNOME's desired target
audience as anyone could be. His dislike of GNOME 3 could almost be seen as a
positive sign.

I think the articles touches on many interesting things, such as:

\- How and why did a number of distributions decide to go their own way? How
does GNOME plan to respond? Maybe being the default for a smaller number of
distros means less restrictions and less need for compromise, who knows.

\- GNOME seems to focus on being great on touch devices, but how will they end
up on those devices if they don't sell hardware?

\- How can GNOME measure its success to know they're heading the right way?
How do they define "success"? If it's the number of users, how can it gather
usage data?

Those are the things I'd like to know more about. Not empty claims of users
leaving in droves, or the suggestion that the only way GNOME will survive
would be to return to its old ways (because back in the day, GNOME 2 dwarfed
Windows and OS X, right?).

(I've read it a number of times now, and I am still completely in the dark as
to how Apple ties in to all this. Surely Apple must be important, since it's
mentioned in the title.)

~~~
wting
I worked on the GNOME project this past summer and went to GUADEC. Attendance
at GUADEC has been steadily declining drastically over the past few years. The
auditorium had ~100 attendees during the _keynote speech_. Many of the side
talks had < 10 listeners.

## Distributions

\- RedHat: Primary GNOME contributor in money and developers. Most attendees
at GUADEC were Fedora users. There were a handful of Ubuntu / SUSE devs.

\- Ubuntu: Unity shell on top of GNOME framework.

\- Linux Mint: Cinnamon was originally a small project, but is currently
gaining momentum.

## Simplicity

There is a goal by the designers to push simplicity. They're not making these
changes based on empirical evidence AFAIK, but rather gut decision.

1\. For example, McCann axed a lot of features from Nautilus:

    
    
      http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/
    

Removed features:

    
    
      - compact view
      - typeahead find
      - split pane view
      - bookmark folders
      - backspace key to go up a directory
      - "tree" view
      - "new file" template
    

2\. Closing laptop lid now unconditionally suspends, settings to change
behavior have been removed:

<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687277>

3\. From GNOME desktop development mailing list, fallback mode will be phased
out now that there is a roughly working software renderer for GNOME shell. The
ones making this decision criticized users for not having a <5 year computer,
completely ignoring the fact that a lot of 3rd world country users are running
on older hardware.

I primarily use fallback mode (with xmonad). In GNOME 3.6, a lot of stuff is
just broken tagged WONTFIX.

## Touch Devices

There was a heavily attended talk about touch UI support in GNOME on tablet
and phone devices.

I brought up this issue with the primary speaker but wasn't satisfied: How are
you going to get hardware manufacturers to adopt GNOME over Android?

Hardware manufacturers make money by selling devices. They will use whichever
software ecosystem that positively impacts their bottom line. There are no
users out there clamoring for GNOME on their tablets. By designing GNOME for
touch, they are instead alienating their existing user base.

## Direction

Quite simply, there is no leadership at GNOME. Yes it's a FOSS project, but
maybe there needs to be a benevolent dictator driving the bus.

Instead there are the designers who are trying to simplify GNOME shell. Others
are moving functionality into web apps. An extremely large group wants to
create a GNOME distro.

One of the biggest questions proposed at GUADEC was where does GNOME go now?
No one seems to know, so instead we have a few key people deciding on their
own in a non-coherent fashion and the project meanders along on cruise
control.

------
arocks
Buried in a very misleading article is a good point:

> (Apple) did not rewrite the OS X desktop that runs on Macs, nor did it try
> to re-imagine the desktop computing paradigm. Apple created something
> entirely new that was always designed with touch screens in mind.

I have never understood why traditional desktops must adopt to touch screen
based GUIs. Why can't both be independently developed? Why is Microsoft and
Canonical trying to unify seemingly unrelated user input paradigms?

~~~
morsch
Because they both have an existing desktop product, both of which are dominant
in their own sphere (Microsoft: desktop computers, Canonical: _Linux_ desktop
computers), and they'd really like to leverage that advantage to get into the
touch-based market, which is predicted to grow massively while desktop is
stagnating.

I guess there are also a few products where both input paradigms make sense,
ie. the tablet/notebook hybrids, you wouldn't want to entirely different user
experiences on a single device depending on the currently chosen input, so you
make a hybrid user experience fitting the hybrid device. The other choice
would be simply not supporting hybrid devices, but clearly that is not what
Microsoft has chosen to do.

------
mtkd
I'm using OSX as things just work on it and the last thing I need is friction
working with my OS - but every day I'm finding it harder to justify my
relationship with Apple.

It's hard to believe with so many big players around that the choice is so
limited right now.

------
ekurutepe
Can please explain the relation between the title and the article? How did
Apple kill Gnome, again?

~~~
tmgrhm
There is none — the title is misleading linkbait. The article only mentions
Apple twice, and even then it doesn't explain what "Apple's poisonous touch"
has to do with GNOME 3 being almost universally disliked — or as the title
puts it, "killed" (which is also completely untrue).

~~~
onli
Not true: "What happened that made GNOME developers seemingly abandon all
sense of sanity and design a desktop interface that almost no one wants? ...
The more likely candidates for inspiring GNOME's 3.0 stumble is Apple's iOS
and Google's Android OS."

Maybe the title is linkbait, but the thesis isn't absurd.

------
UnoriginalGuy
The way this article is written is highly misleading.

> iOS for mobile devices Apple, well, created iOS for mobile devices. It did
> not rewrite the OS X desktop that runs on Macs. Apple created something
> entirely new that was always designed with touch screens in mind.

Except that is untrue. Or to quote Apple during the iPhone's initial release:

> iPhone uses OS X, the world’s most advanced operating system.

What later became known as "iOS" is based on OS X which is its self based on
Darwin. You could fairly argue that OS X for the i-devices was a fork but to
say Apple made something "entirely new" is just false.

~~~
FireBeyond
Not to mention calling OS X "the world's most advanced operating system" is
entirely subjective, and highly debatable.

------
luos
I use gnome because my computer can't run unity. :)

I didn't wanted to change to other desktop because as it always happens to me,
something goes wrong and i can't use my system for half a day. (Today i'm
upgrading to 11.10, the support term is over for .04, I hope it goes well...)

~~~
willvarfar
Pssssst xubuntu

~~~
pubby
Or anything running XCFE or LXDE.

------
h2s

        > Linux Torvalds himself called GNOME 3 "an unholy
        > mess", going on to add that he's never met anyone
        > who likes it.
    

Stay classy, El Reg.

