
Gnome: Staring into the abyss - jonrob
http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/
======
kijin
1\. As the author says toward the end of the article, I think the biggest
problem with Gnome nowadays is that only a small number of people actually use
it on a day-to-day basis. Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted
away from it. No matter what merits Gnome 3 might have, it was such a flop in
its first few releases that it has the Windows Vista stigma attached to it. Of
course, there's GTK and several Gnome apps that people do use on a daily
basis. But for many people, Gnome itself is decidedly uncool. No wonder they
don't want to contribute to it.

2\. If Gnome really wants to win back the hearts of potential contributors
(i.e. power users), they'd better make programs that appeal to that
demographic. People who have the skill and motivation to make significant
contributions to a free software project often want a lot of room for
configuration, including the option to use the desktop in a traditional
manner. Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like
slamming the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users,
but none of them will ever submit a single patch.

3\. Gnome is too big for its own good. Why does a desktop environment project
need to maintain a complete stack of apps and libraries, from GTK to Gnome
Shell to a text editor to a bundle of games to a web browser to an email
client to a media player to a full-blown spreadsheet app? Why can't they just
tell people to get a third-party browser? They should spin off the rest and
focus on GTK, the Shell, and a small number of essential utilities. If
Epiphany or Gnumeric died a slow and lonely death, how many people would
really care? Heck, if you don't have the manpower to maintain anything else,
just give me GTK so I can install xfce or lxde on top of it. It's really just
Firefox and LibreOffice and VLC that I want, and I don't need Gnome to run
them.

Edit: some rephrasing.

~~~
Mr_T_
> _Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like slamming
> the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users, but
> none of them will ever submit a single patch._

An experienced developer should be mature enough to know that he and his kind
should not be the target audience of his product. And putting in all those
little checkboxes makes a product a horrible experience for the rest of the
world.

~~~
ordinary
If you pay me, I will work selflessly for the masses. I will implement
features I don't need, I will fix bugs I don't care about and I will write
documentation for features I already know in and out.

If you don't pay me, I will still contribute, but then I will work only to
scratch my own itch. I will implement features, but only those I want to have
myself; I will fix bugs, but only those that annoy me personally; I will write
some documentation, sometimes.

If you don't pay me, and your project goals make it impossible for me to
scratch my itch, then I will not contribute to it.

~~~
Mr_T_
If this is the attitude of all community developers then free software UI will
never become successful.

~~~
muyuu
This is exactly what shapes the areas of success for OSS. It's glaringly
obvious looking back, that success perfectly matches the motivation of
contributors in different areas.

And that said, it doesn't need to be so difficult to include all these pesky
checkboxes in a way that they don't confuse or hinder usability for n00bish
users. This used to work for Gnome 2. Never met anyone who thought Gnome 2 was
too hard or counter-intuitive, they were just more or less used to it. Windows
XP and Windows 7 have a lot more checkboxes if you look for them.

~~~
spartango
Sorry, gnome 2 was hardly 'easy', which is the bar that modern, commercial
window managers are setting. 'Not hard' and 'not counter-intuitive' doesn't
cut it any more for the bulk of users, who are less savvy than previously.

If there's one thing that Apple and even Microsoft are showing with their
window manager and widgets, its that simpler is better, and we've been missing
that all these years.

~~~
joe_the_user
I had to walk my 80 year stepfather through an OSX install yesterday. He would
definitely have failed if I hadn't been there (he still got stuck for five
minutes on the gesture screen (or whatever it was), which neither us really
got). He's used Macs for years - without being a power user of course. I
_don't_ think Mac _are_ getting easier. They're getting harder to use but more
"impressive", more filled with theater. And sure that's the "bar" that modern
OSes are "setting". If open source follows in those steps, it certainly will
be lost (and it's stumble a few steps down that well already).

Whether you call Gnome 2 hard or easy, it's main problem was that it's
configuration apps and menus were confusingly organized. If the incremental
improvements Ubuntu was making could have continued a few more years, things
might have been great. The decision to create "Gnome shell" probably forced
Canonical's hand but Unity also seems terrible to me.

------
abenga
This is really sad if it's true. I'm probably in the minority, but I think
GNOME 3 (even without extensions) is the best Linux desktop at the moment. It
does seem strange when you look at it at first, but once you use it for a week
or so and use anything different (even GNOME 2 which I'd used for years), you
feel stifled in a way. It's hard to put into words, it just feels like it's
out of your way.

Anecdote: I work at a small actuarial firm that uses Linux desktops, and when
I migrated everyone (ten people) over to Ubuntu 12.04, they all loved GNOME 3.

~~~
thingie
I have mac user walking around in the office and asking me what kind of a
desktop environment is it, being genuinely (positively) surprised that it is
actually GNOME desktop on Linux. Well. And I have other Linux desktop users
(like Xfce or something even more 'geeky', even TWM) that are genuinely
surprise that I can just plug in another display and have it work without
touching the command line (not that I can't use CLI xrandr, but why would I).

~~~
Semaphor
> that are genuinely surprise that I can just plug in another display and have
> it work without touching the command line

I use XFCE on my low end/old laptops. I don't need to touch the commandline
either nor did I a few (1-3) years ago.

------
ebassi
as one of the two people mentioned by name in Benjamin's blog post, I'd like
to point out that I didn't "leave GNOME" (to work on other stuff).

I am still involved in the community, I am a director of the foundation's
board, and I'm still working on Gnome projects in my spare time - which is
actually easier these days since I moved from intel to mozilla.

I'm typing this from GUADEC 2012, in A Coruña; the conference is absolutely
delightful, there's a lot of talks about direction and future involvement, and
everyone here is really excited about moving Gnome forward, as well as
regaining the enthusiasts market.

not everything is bleak and bad.

~~~
tytso
I'd love to hear how you think you're going to regain the enthusiasts' market.
Care to say more? In particular, which enthusiasts? The ones who have already
(like me) switched to Xfce? Or some other set of enthusiasts? Defining your
market is important; if GNOME is going to continue to have a severe case of
Mac-envy, I doubt you'll be able to also get back the enthusiasts --- and I
don't think GNOME has enough developers to be able to complete head-to-head
with Apple.

~~~
ebassi
"enthusiasts" are not just "computer enthusiasts"; I want to excite users and
make them care about Gnome - and I want to get excited, interested users, to
contribute back to the community by making it dead easy to do so: create
interesting apps, create documentation, create content, organize and attend
events. in Gnome we have amazing outreach programs that give us new
contributors every year - and most of them stick around, because we're a cool
(even if sometimes too much introspective) community, where people care about
people first, and software second.

I don't see Gnome as suffering from "Mac-envy" - mostly because everyone
envies Apple's profits and margins, if not their user share; I mean, who
wouldn't envy Apple. we don't have the resources to do multi-year usability
studies involving tons of people; and we still lack the tools like Telemetry
to get (consensual) user feedback. so we need to take inspiration in our
designs and plans from stuff that others are doing, as well as doing our own
thing. I mean, the GNOME 3 shell overview is basically Mission Control from
Lion - but we designed it in 2008, well before Lion screenshots were released
or leaked to the press; who copied who? ;-)

competing with Apple is also a false goal; we want to keep the keep the users
free, as well as providing them tools and an environment that allows them to
achieve their goals in a simple and delightful way. that will put us up
against Apple, and Microsoft, and Samsung, and basically everyone. it never
stopped us for the past 15 years, I don't think it will stop us now.

------
hcarvalhoalves
I'm afraid everything desktop Linux, and by extension Gnome, just lost a lot
of momentum by developers moving to Apple + web development. Nowadays most
focus on open source front seem to be on lower level projects (languages,
libraries, servers). FOSS focused on final-user applications remains a niche
for academia and developer-centric tools, little has changed compared to what
used to be available in the 2000's.

~~~
octotoad
I've noticed this over the years when reading developer blogs via sites like
Planet GNOME.

In the first half of the last decade, there seemed to be highly motivated,
talented groups of contributors who helped build and maintain momentum in many
popular open source projects like Gnome. I'm not saying there aren't top notch
developers still working on FOSS, but many of those big-name 'rockstar'
contributors seem to have either been lured to a competing/alternative
platform, or just simply lost interest.

I often wonder if age plays an important role, with many former wide-eyed,
young, idealistic developers possibly adopting an attitude along the lines of
"meh. Maybe I should just buy a Mac and worry less about ideals and
philosophies" as they get older and priorities change.

~~~
mseepgood
> but many of those big-name 'rockstar' contributors seem to have either been
> lured to a competing/alternative platform

Many have been hired by companies, e.g. Nokia, and now don't want to work for
free again.

~~~
vtry
This, in a Capitalist society where housing and cost of living so high, why
would you want to work for free if you can work for money?

Now if we live in a Resource Based Economy, then that is possible, but until
then, money is king.

~~~
bkor
I think you're mixing up things.

I contribute to GNOME, and that is not "working for free". It means having a
fun hobby. If I'd get money for it, it would no longer be a hobby, but work. I
did hear some people say that their hobby is the same as their work. IMO, work
is more restricted (try doing nothing at all for 3 months with your hobby,
then repeat for your work).

------
mindcrime
One more anecdote for you... I'd been a content (if not exactly thrilled) user
of Gnome for a decade or so. Then, I bought a new laptop, which prompted me to
install Fedora 15, which was my first exposure to Gnome3, as my old laptop was
running a really old Fedora version which had Gnome2.

So... after 2-3 hours of Gnome3, I had had more than enough to prompt me to
bite the bullet and switch to KDE. There is nothing good I can say about
Gnome3... trying to use it was painful in about every way I could imagine.
Nothing works the way I expect, and nothing was intuitive at all.

KDE, on the other hand, has been a pleasant surprise. I'd dabbled with it 10+
years ago, but never made the permanent switch... and given that they had gone
through their own "change everything and piss off all the users" thing a while
back, I wasn't sure what to expect. But after using it a couple of days, I
couldn't be happier. It took a few minutes to figure out some of the new
approaches they've adopted but - by and large - a little trail and error, some
exploration, and intuition, and I was back to productive work almost
immediately.

I have no hard feelings towards the Gnome team or anything, but they're just
trying to go in a direction that I'm not interested in. Best of luck to Gnome,
but KDE is a clearly superior choice for me right now, and I'm thrilled to
have made the switch.

~~~
nnythm
I had a similar experience, where I found that none of my computers, neither
my six year old laptop, nor my one year old laptop (!) could support GNOME 3,
which has essentially prevented me from upgrading my fedora from 14. Since
Fedora is currently on version 17, this makes me sad, and ruminating about
which OS to jump ship to.

------
yason
Gnome 3 shattered the experience and momentum.

While Gnome 2 was gradually approaching ultimate goodness with its essential
configurability (not too many knobs but an explicit set of gconf properties
that you could tune if you wanted to), consistency, ease of use, and ten years
of GTK2 providing a platform for applications that look and behave uniformly,
it was certainly lacking in the integration side (networking, messaging, etc.)
for which Gnome 3 is a response.

However, Gnome 3 broke so many little things that it doesn't matter what the
new features do. This is one of the cases where Microsoft has been right: when
you're big enough, don't muck with backwards-compatibility.

~~~
slurgfest
Gnome 2 was continuing to slavishly emulate Windows 98, right down to the
opaque registry. But I guess that's what more users wanted, so Linux is doomed
to stay the same forever as everything else innovates and overtakes it.

~~~
ixacto
I want my desktop to look like, but not be Windows 98. I don't like the MS
registry, or anything else MS for that matter, Debian With a desktop
environment that enforces the desktop metaphor is a sensible alternative...

It would not be that easy to write a long email, let alone an article on a
tablet or tablet-like computer interface.

------
mithaler
The key problem with Gnome 3 is that it wants to be both general-purpose and
opinionated.

Gnome 2 was an excellent basis for a desktop because there were so many ways
it could be used. It didn't limit you; you were free to trim out things you
didn't want, or add things you wanted. Aside from that, it got out of the way.

Gnome 3 aims for the same demographic, but tries to force too many opinionated
decisions on its users from the start. Distros that care about branding hate
that because it makes it hard for them to differentiate (see Ubuntu). Many
users hate that because it's too many things that they can't change without
learning a new Javascript platform. It's certainly fair to say that typical
Linux users (their target market, whether they like it or not) aren't used to
that.

This post is wrong to blame tablets and smartphones for the decline. Linux
users aren't abandoning desktops; they're abandoning Gnome 3, because it isn't
giving them what they want. It's that simple.

------
loftsy
I'm fascinated that all the real innovation going on in desktop environments
(gnome3, unity, windows 8) seems to be taking a hammering. This is possibly
just a case of the vocal minority and normal resistance to change but it will
be interesting to see it all shake out in a year or two.

In my view Gnome should try to emulate the android model. Build the whole
stack up to the widget level (they are really good at this) and then publish a
couple of apps and an app store.

~~~
trekkin
> I'm fascinated that all the real innovation going on in desktop environments
> (gnome3, unity, windows 8) seems to be taking a hammering.

Envy-driven development is not a good model. Desktop environments do not need
tablet features in the first place...

> This is possibly just a case of the vocal minority and normal resistance to
> change but it will be interesting to see it all shake out in a year or two.

Or the opposite can be true - a powerful minority (project/company leaders),
envious of other companies' success on tablets, decided to spend a lot of
resources to try to enter this space, to the detriment of the majority of
their (desktop) users.

~~~
loftsy
All projects and companies need a vision and clearly for a lot of designers,
developers and product managers this vision is more integrated simpler to use,
touch enabled devices. Part my comment was to say it is not yet clear that
this is the right long term solution but its not like there are any compelling
alternatives.

Microsoft is not entering the space because of envy(?!?) they are entering it
because that is where they see the future of computing.

------
mike-cardwell
This would have worried me back when Unity was crap a year or so ago. Now
Unity is actually good, it doesn't matter if Gnome dies a slow death; we'll
still have multiple good alternatives that are still being enhanced.

~~~
csense
Unity is still crap. It might be suitable for a tablet or a phone, but it'll
never fly on the desktop, for any but a tiny subset of users. In case you
haven't noticed, most people hate it, and are delaying upgrades, installing
Gnome or switching to Mint in droves.

One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I want
to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see what I
have. With Unity you have to bring up the whatever and try typing search
terms. If you don't know what you're searching for, it can be difficult -- and
lots of times, you don't know the name of the application, because they have
clever branded marketing names (Evolution, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Shotwell,
Chromium, etc.) which don't have their primary function ("image," "photo,"
"web," "email") as a substring.

Discoverability is particularly important for "control panel" type system
administration applets, which are often vital to making your system function
acceptably, and whose name, number, hierarchy, and division of functionality
seem to mutate with every release.

Also, there are switching costs. The Unity interface is so foreign, I'd need
several days -- possibly weeks -- to get as proficient with Unity as I am with
Windows, Gnome 2 or Cinnamon. That's definitely a cost in time and
frustration, and the benefits aren't clear.

Some features -- like the Mac-like "there's only one instance of each
application" -- seem designed to cater to n00bs who need hand-holding because
they don't understand the concept of multiple application instances, or the
difference between launching an application and switching to an instance of
that application.

I want multiple instances of certain applications -- terminals particularly --
and it's a major pain point with Unity. So not only do I have reduced
productivity during the transition period, it seems like Unity is actually
going to decrease my productivity once I do learn it, due to lack or hiding of
core features.

Add to that the fact that Unity would crash regularly within the first hour of
use when 11.10, the first Unity-only version of Ubuntu, was released.

I gave it a fair shot on two or three different occasions -- I think once when
it was still called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, again when the beta was released,
and finally with the official release of 11.10. (And a few incidental times
when I've booted the Ubuntu CD for various reasons.)

In each case, within an hour of use I've concluded that Unity is a nightmare.

~~~
mike-cardwell
> Unity is still crap. It might be suitable for a tablet or a phone, but it'll
> never fly on the desktop, for any but a tiny subset of users. In case you
> haven't noticed, most people hate it, and are delaying upgrades, installing
> Gnome or switching to Mint in droves.

It works well on my laptop. Most people don't hate it. Those who tried earlier
versions of it and hated it then (myself included) are pleasantly surprised
when they give it another look.

> One important function of the Start menu is discoverability of apps. If I
> want to see what junk I have installed, I can look through the menus to see
> what I have. With Unity you have to bring up the whatever and try typing
> search terms. If you don't know what you're searching for, it can be
> difficult -- and lots of times, you don't know the name of the application,
> because they have clever branded marketing names (Evolution, Firefox, GIMP,
> Inkscape, Shotwell, Chromium, etc.) which don't have their primary function
> ("image," "photo," "web," "email") as a substring.

This is hideously out of date. If I hit the windows key and type "image", then
"gimp" and "inkscape" are in the list of choices. If I type "photo" I get
"shotwell", "gimp" and "cheese". If I type "web", I get "firefox", "opera" and
"chrome. "email" gives me "thunderbird".

> Also, there are switching costs. The Unity interface is so foreign, I'd need
> several days -- possibly weeks -- to get as proficient with Unity as I am
> with Windows, Gnome 2 or Cinnamon. That's definitely a cost in time and
> frustration, and the benefits aren't clear.

This is an argument against "change", not an argument against "unity".

> Some features -- like the Mac-like "there's only one instance of each
> application" -- seem designed to cater to n00bs who need hand-holding
> because they don't understand the concept of multiple application instances,
> or the difference between launching an application and switching to an
> instance of that application. I want multiple instances of certain
> applications -- terminals particularly -- and it's a major pain point with
> Unity. So not only do I have reduced productivity during the transition
> period, it seems like Unity is actually going to decrease my productivity
> once I do learn it, due to lack or hiding of core features.

It takes hardly any time to get used to this change. Personally, my web
browser, email client, terminal and text editor all support tabs, so I us
ually only have one window per app anyway.

> Add to that the fact that Unity would crash regularly within the first hour
> of use when 11.10, the first Unity-only version of Ubuntu, was released.

I'm not interested in older versions of Unity. I already said they were crap.

> I gave it a fair shot on two or three different occasions -- I think once
> when it was still called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, again when the beta was
> released, and finally with the official release of 11.10. (And a few
> incidental times when I've booted the Ubuntu CD for various reasons.)

> In each case, within an hour of use I've concluded that Unity is a
> nightmare.

So you're qualified to state that Unity _was_ a nightmare. Not that Unity _is_
a nightmare.

~~~
slurgfest
> Most people don't hate it. Those who tried earlier versions of it and hated
> it then (myself included) are pleasantly surprised when they give it another
> look.

I don't understand this, because I have used it off and on from the beginning
and it really looks completely the same to me.

------
keithpeter
RHEL 7 will be based on Fedora 18

<http://rhel7.net/news/98-rhel-7-roadmap>

which means we might see RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux/PUIAS users on Gnome 3.6

<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18>

Personally, I've worked out I spend little time actually _using_ the overall
desktop GUI, so I'm not too sensitive to changes in UI logic. Typical end user
I suppose.

I suspect the change to systemd will cause rather more fur to fly than the GUI
in Enterprise circles.

I hope the author of the original article gets a bit of support and finds a
direction for his labours.

------
madmax108
Damn, I knew Gnome was doing badly, but din't know it was this bad! :|

I personally am a fan of Gnome, and hope that they become relevent again.
Unity is too fancy for my linking, and Unity 2D, which seems an option, is now
deprecated! :|

~~~
zalew
One word: Xfce

~~~
mseepgood
Xfce has more manpower than Gnome? Xfce has achieved the transition to GTK+ 3?
(both rhetorical questions)

~~~
tytso
I don't want XFCE to transition to GTK+3. As near as I can tell it's a
nightmare, since it's so tightly tied to GNOME (fair enough, but I switched to
Xfce to escape the tyranny of the GNOME UI designers).

------
CrazedGeek
This is the (dead) G+ post by Linus that he refers to:
[http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-
gnome...](http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome-for-
xfce/)

~~~
Mr_T_
What these articles never mention is a follow-up comment by Torvalds:

"And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use
Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse"
[https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...](https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDpF4i)

~~~
VMG
This is also the way I feel. I don't quite like Gnome3 but it seems like the
least worst option at the moment for me.

Tiling window managers, fluxbox etc: too much configuration, not sexy enough

Xfce: also doesn't look as slick, bugs

KDE: sluggish

I really like the Expose(?)-feature and really would miss it

~~~
aerique
Just to chip in on the tiling window managers: i3[1] is a really nice one
which doesn't need a lot of configuration. Since switching from Window Maker,
which I had been using for 10+ years, it has been the only window manager that
didn't make me switch back.

(I tried out Xmonad, Awesome, Stumpwm and some other window managers over the
years. Awesome was pretty close to awesome.)

i3 has a couple of issues I like to see resolved but all-in-all I'm very happy
with it.

[1] <http://i3wm.org/>

~~~
bashinator
Try scrotwm[1] - it's an xmonad workalike, but it's written in C instead of
Haskell (not so important to me), and it has a config file instead of ...
Haskell (quite a bit more important to me).

Also, terrible and hilarious name.

[1] <http://www.peereboom.us/scrotwm/html/scrotwm.html>

~~~
aerique
If it works like xmonad I'm not really interested. I don't like xmonad's
approach to tiling wm's (mostly the master / slave window thing).

------
sgarrity
For what it's worth, I've been very pleased with Gnome 3 and the new direction
and focus in Gnome interface and design.

------
aaronh
_whinge_

meh, other than bus factor this seems overblown to me. I use Gnome3 on Fedora
and it is great. It takes advantage of Fitts law and there is just less fuck-
around-ability with it. (I thought even the Alt-to-PowerOff controversy was
overblown; I suspend far more often then I shut down, this is a welcome
simplification) If anything I felt Gnome3 had ushered in a renaissance in
Gnome. What "new" goals does Gnome have to have other than creating a great
desktop?

Please don't drive more developers away with more gratuitous Hacker News
"X-is-dying" bitching.

~~~
aaronh
by the way, I think if Gnome had "done nothing" by continuing to incrementally
develop Gnome2 instead of doing something entirely new with Gnome3 the same
argument would be trooped out: "Look, Gnome isn't innovating, it doesn't have
vision, it's just a Windows clone, blah blah blah"

------
aksx
I use Gtk on a daily basis while working to the elementary os. I just love
their Vala language,it gives me the ease of c# and speed of C. But the thing
is there is not much documentation present. The irc channel feels slow. I
encountered a bug in Vte about a week ago about transparency and no one is
able to help. This as a dev discourages me. I use Vala and Gtk solely because
the elementary team uses it. Gnome becoming _uncool_ has started a vicious
circle which will lead to its death.

------
PaulHoule
to understand the sickness of Gnome you've got to go way way back to the
beginning...

I remember when KDE first came out -- I heard the first press releases and
thought they were on drugs, but when I downloaded and built, I was like "wow!
this is so close to being a commercial desktop"

Now, in 2012, we have KDE and Gnome and a few off-brand desktops and it's
still like "this is so close to being a commercial desktop" -- but there isn't
any Wow anymore.

Red Hat didn't like the license of the QT toolkit, so they had to go out and
build their own desktop, which was probably the most disasterous decision in
the history of Linux -- it's like Windows Vista without Windows 7.

For a long term all of the major linux distros have been wasting time and
resources trying to make linux something nobody cares about. There's an
obsession, for instance, about office suites that are so bad they make
Microsoft Office look like a paragon of reliability and ease-of-use.

On the other hand, there's been a complete disregard for the people who
~really~ use Linux such as sysadmins and developers.

I've recently set up two laptops that run Windows as a host and Ubuntu linux
inside Virtualbox. I use "putty" as my *term program and Cygwin/X to run the
occasional GUI app I need from Linux. It's a sign of what a disgrace the Linux
desktop is that putty has the same ease-of-use and reliability that xterm had
15 years ago, whereas the "terminal" program that Ubuntu tries to push on you
is a bloated disaster in which cut-and-paste is as miserable as it was in Win
3.1.

~~~
sigzero
I believe Gnome pre-dates Red Hat and it wasn't Red Hat that made the decision
to create GTK. Although I could be wrong.

~~~
lmm
GTK predates gnome and RedHat, but was (at the start) really just a code layer
in the GIMP.

Gnome was a response to KDE, and explicitly aimed to produce a KDE-quality
Free desktop environment. If they were intellectually honest they'd have
abandoned/merged the project when Qt was relicensed.

~~~
dman
You dont let your users down just because someone else changed their license.

------
FlyingSnake
Since no one mentioned Cinnamon (LinuxMint) let me add that to the discussion.

I've been using it exclusively for months and I feel that it is doing what
Gnome3 wanted to achieve. It is simple, intuitive and rock-solid. Never froze
or crashed and diagnostic tools are great.

LinuxMint is the old Ubuntu which you used to recommend to your friends and
family.

------
MrUnderhill
I've always wondered why the platform Blender uses hasn't turned into a
generic UI toolkit or even window manager. Granted, Blender itself is rather
overwhelming at first glance, but you only have to spend a few minutes with it
to fall in love with the snappiness and adaptivity of the interface.

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CD1212
In my opinion Gnome needs a completely new start, from the ground up.

1\. When I last used GTK (about 2 years ago) it felt too big, old and bloated.
If GTK were simplified and followed Qt's lead into scripting and easier
interfaces (eg. Qt Quick), plus a MIT or LGPL license, this would encourage a
new culture of apps.

2\. I hated Gnome 3 and Unity for that matter. Gnome 4 needs to take a step
back and get out of the way. You don't use the computer just for Gnome, but
you use Gnome as a stepping stone. All common apps should be one click away
and everything should be as customizable and flexible as possible.

As kljin said, some Gnome apps are redundant and the workforce could do a much
better job focusing on the core issues, that could bring more people back to
Gnome and hence possibly continue these projects again in the future.

~~~
progrock
I don't want to bash Gnome. I have Debian testing (Wheezy), and I did try
Gnome 3. It's steadily improving, though I still have issues with it. I try it
every now and then - but I'm retreating to XFCE for the time being.

Gnome feels un-unified. I guess this has always been the way under Linux, what
with QT, GTK and other toolkits, but when one app is slightly at odds with the
rest of the Desktop - it feels, odd.

Example being non GTK3 apps, like LibreOffice (though someone here suggests
that that is being rectified.) Even VLC, Opera, Firefox and Chrome feel a
little out of place. Each behaves differently. You can't quit VLC with CTRL+W
for example. Each are designed on different toolkits. Menus are inconsistant.
Tabbing behaves differently in each app (can't we relegate this to the Window
Manager or Desktop?) Keyboard shortcut unification doesn't exist. These are
the edges I'd like to see addressed across the Linux desktop as a user.

Perhaps unification is a lofty target. And we should just be happy with the
fragmented cottage patchwork.

I don't even know the difference between GTK, GTK2 and GTK3 and QT! My desktop
is such a pain to theme it's a nightmare, I certainly notice that. What's new
in layman's terms in GTK3?

As for some core apps, Evolution looked promising. But even that feels a
little rough around the edges (I can crash it quite easily.) Thunderbird
doesn't integrate with Gnome brilliantly. One flagship email client would be
nice.

Focus on the core, the desktop design guidelines and some intrinisically
needed apps. Most desktops on Linux seem to suffer in much the same way. Unity
still appears ad-hoc.

I guess a good aspiration would be to make it as simple as possible for people
to create applications as well as use them under Gnome.

Could there be some kind of CSSification of an app's controls? Present them as
interfaces that could be styled differently according to the platform you are
on. Leaving Window Managers to take on the role of innovative desktops.
Perhaps apps are designed like this already? At least it would be easier to
port an application across different form factors.

~~~
mseepgood
> "Could there be some kind of CSSification of an app's controls?"

That's exactly a feature that GTK 3 introduced: CSS theming.

~~~
sparkie
All great, except a large portion of apps are still Gtk2 based, which means
any potential theme developer needs to make his theme at least somewhat
compatible with Gtk2 so there's a consistent desktop.

What should have been done, is the CSS in Gtk3 should've been designed with
backward compatibility in mind, and the tooling to automate the creation of a
Gtk2 theme based on a Gtk3 stylesheet.

As it is, they can't even move from 3.0 to 3.2 without breaking themes. I've
no idea what the situation was for 3.4 or later, but I imagine much of the
same.

Also, theming is missing a usable distribution and installation model.
Currently, users are expected to simply extract an archive into a specific
directory and follow any instructions that come with the theme - some include
shell scripts. This is hardly "user friendly," like they claim they're
attempting to make Gnome.

------
scribblemacher
I like Gnome 3 in that it made me explore other WM/DE options and think more
about what I wanted.

I found Awesome, and though there are some things I don't like about it (or
namely, some programs that don't work nicely in a tiling environment), every
time I try to use another WM or a DE, I miss the speed and keyboard
accessibility of Awesome. It's a blast to use.

I installed KDE for my wife to use. It takes KDE an order of magnitude longer
to start than Awesome, for all those services and stuff that it's running--you
know, all that stuff I'm probably not even using.

------
UK-AL
A lot of people are mentioning a lot of distos are moving away from gnome.
Infact they are moving away from gnome shell, not gnome. If gnome has
problems, we all have problems.

------
forgottenpaswrd
GNOME is not necessary anymore. It was in the past, not today.

We have Qt that really works, much much better, and with LGPL license.

You can run stellarium, VLC or Marble in Mac or Windows without problems.

If you try to use gimp or inkscape in mac it opens x11, copy and paste does
not work(in inkscape it copies pixmaps instead of vectors!!), what a botched
job.

In windows you will have a lot of problems too.

GTK support for OpenGL, OpenCL was terrible, having to low code everything,
while in Qt works as well as with cocoa.

Let GTK die and improve(or fork) Qt.

~~~
exDM69
> GTK support for OpenGL, OpenCL was terrible, having to low code everything,
> while in Qt works as well as with cocoa.

OpenGL support sucks in GTK and QT equally. Especially if you want a more
recent version of GL.

OpenCL does not depend on your widget toolkit in any way.

> Let GTK die and improve(or fork) Qt.

Qt is not really as great as you seem to suggest. It's a bloated "batteries
included" framework that has everything from it's own string type to wrappers
for things like threads and sockets. GTK is a widget library that is a lot
leaner and meaner in comparison.

These massive platforms that try to wrap everything in the underlying
operating systems to a common API use only the least common denominator of the
systems that it runs on. The easy 80% works quite well but things tend to fail
miserably when you enter the 20% realm. Things like memory mapped files or
asynchronous socket i/o tend to be missing from these wrapper platforms.

And Qt is still using an old non-standard conforming version of C++ to achieve
portability to things like Symbian. And their own C++ extensions that require
you to use their build system and pre-processing tools. So you can't really
use Qt without going all the way to Qt land.

~~~
sparkie
Probably worth adding that Qt being C++ is itself a problem - as it makes it
inaccessible to the majority of programmers, due to the lack of ABI
compatibility with C++ and any other languages. Gtk+ on the other hand, is
almost universally accessible, because any language worth using can bind C
APIs.

Of course, the downside here is that all the Gtk+ bindings to other languages
are based on the Gtk+2 API. Gtk+3 hasn't gained much popular support.

~~~
exDM69
> Probably worth adding that Qt being C++ is itself a problem

Yep. C++ is what I call a "dead end" language. If you write your code in C++,
it will be only usable from C++. If you want to use it from Python, Ruby or
whatever, you'll need a C shim in between. If it were written in C, you could
use ctypes and other similar means to do FFI quickly.

Unfortunately, most languages other than C are more or less a dead end.

~~~
maigret
> Unfortunately, most languages other than C are more or less a dead end.

Except for Java, where you can reuse code directly with JVM-compiling stacks
like Clojure.

~~~
exDM69
Well that is arguable. If you stay within JVM, you can use your Java code from
other languages like Clojure and Scala. To some extent you can use Scala and
Clojure code from Java. But you can't really use Java code from Python or Ruby
unless you work with Jython or JRuby.

So, I'd put Java in the "dead end language" bin. You can use C code from Java
(via JNI) but it's not practical to do it the other way.

------
raikia
Drop Gnome 3. Convince Mint developers to have Gnome team join in on Cinnamon.
Finally make Cinnamon stable. Profit.

------
rnadna
If the existence of both GNOME and KDE has held back developers who are
reluctant to halve their user community or double their coding efforts, then
the collapse of GNOME may be a good thing.

------
cs702
This is fallout of a battle-by-proxy between Red Hat (Gnome's _de facto_
sponsor) and Canonical (Unity's sponsor) for the future of Desktop Linux.
Canonical seems to be winning.

------
jebblue
At some point people will realize that smart phones are great for
communication but the desktop and mainframes will continue to be how people
get real computing work done and games.

------
jstalin
Wow, am I one of the few people who really likes Gnome 3? I use it on my
primary home PC on top of Ubuntu 12.04. I love it.

------
SlipperySlope
This is the canary in the coal mine with regards to the acceptance of the
Microsoft Metro interface on the desktop.

------
jhaglund
I wonder how many other people, after reading this, ran: sudo apt-get install
gnome

