
The future of GNOME - bergie
http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2012/07/31/the-future-of-gnome/
======
monkeyfacebag
GNOME 3 is a really great, well integrated (if not particularly innovative)
desktop environment. Unfortunately, it broke existing workflows, which led to
a great deal of criticism on its release. Had GNOME 3 had been a new,
unrelated product rather than the next version of GNOME, there would be, if
not more excitement about it, at least less criticism.

Making radical changes to an incumbent system is difficult and often
thankless, even when the new version is, if not objectively better than the
previous, very good. Apple encountered this with the transition to OS X.
Anyone who remembers the "Classic" environment can attest to how poorly this
transition was perceived by many Mac fans. Microsoft has a real problem on its
hands trying to convince users that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7.

Ultimately, GNOME 3 feels like a much better _designed_ environment than the
previous version. For those that tried an early release and gave up on it, I'd
encourage you to go back and try it again.

~~~
CoffeeDregs
100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style
"switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of
keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2.

The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to
appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome,
terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle
with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I
do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect.

The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show
mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job
getting out of my way while I do my work.

~~~
mertd
You mean something like these?

<https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/>

~~~
bergie
Yep, this is a major part of GNOME3 that most people haven't yet noticed.
Thanks to it being done in JavaScript, you can hack your desktop like a web
app: [https://cannonerd.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/hack-
gnome3-like-...](https://cannonerd.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/hack-gnome3-like-
browser/)

This includes stuff like _reload_ (Alt-F2 r) and a reasonably nice data
inspector (Alt-F2 lg).

~~~
technomancy
lg is much more than just a data inspector, it's a full-blown REPL. The fact
that you can jump in and interactively eval code directly in the running
process is huge and opens things up to a whole new level of hackability.

~~~
fmoralesc
And there is a DBUS interface for it, so you can even push code into the shell
from external processes.

------
tomrod
If I could say anything to the Gnome3team:

"I used gnome 3 shell for 6 months until I could no longer stand it. Please
please, Gnome team, go back to Gnome2 or Mate. The desktop really doesn't need
reinventing. You're solving fixed problems!"

Unfortunately, I don't know how well the open source adopts the philosophical
concept of sunk costs.

~~~
monkeyfacebag
> The desktop really doesn't need reinventing.

I'm surprised people think this. Do you think we're going to still be using
the Windows 95 model in 10 years?

Sure, the relative importance of the desktop will diminish as other forms of
input become viable, but we're not there yet. I still do 95% of my work in a
desktop environment with multiple windows and everything, just like I did 10
years ago. The difference is that the desktop environments I have access to
now are better than the ones I had then. I hope that trend continues.

~~~
jsz0
I don't think the desktop needs reinvention. Enhancements and modernizations
are great but our workflows are so refined at this point the cost of
reinvention is ridiculously high. If you take away something that works for
the user and replace it with something new they better be sure it's so much
better the users are willing to throw away existing workflows and experience.
I've yet to see anything that would justify throwing it all away. Within the
constrains of keyboard/pointer input on a 2D display it's going to be tough to
make that huge leap forward. I suspect the next big leap forward will be AI
advanced enough to just eliminate the need for these carefully crafted
workflows. If I could tell my computer what I wanted to achieve and let it
sort out the workflow I wouldn't care as much about the UI. Even then I would
still need a classic desktop interface available for tasks too complex to
explain to the computer -- or too complex for it to figure out on its own.

~~~
monkeyfacebag
> our workflows are so refined at this point

Whose workflows and at what point? Do we think the children born today will be
satisfied with GNOME 2 (or GNOME 3 for that matter)? I agree that we're
playing fast and loose with the definition of "reinvention" here (and that
GNOME 3 is clearly not a reinvention of anything--to be fair, he started it!),
but I think there's room for better than incremental improvements in all
facets of computing, including the desktop.

~~~
dman
The success of this reinvention hinges on being able to attract the next
generation of hackers. The future belongs to them and they should be
encouraged to invent is as they see fit. The risk is that throwing away the
existing way of doing things pushes away people who are active contributors
and have know how about the codebase. So far the desktop is losing because the
next generation of talent seems to be fixated on the web stack at this point.

~~~
na85
That fixation will change. We're seeing a resurgence of the server-terminal
paradigm that was popular in a bygone era.

People enjoy the idea of not having to sync their data because it's all "on
the cloud" (eyeball roll) and because they have a 3G modem.

Sooner or later that enthusiasm will fizzle out.

------
dredmorbius
The GNOME team really doesn't get it.

When you've got your own people, tons of power users, ordinary users, and key
kernel devs telling you you've gone astray, something's wrong. What we're
seeing is fortress mentality and hunkering down. Wrong move.

Ted T'so has commented on his desktop woes at length on G+. I lifted one a
reply he made to his own post which I feel gets to the heart of the problem,
and what is really necessary for a desktop solution (probably XFCE4 for most
people these days). Note that Ted's including both GNOME and KDE in his
criticisms:

 _My concern with KDE is how bloated it's become. I don't want highly
integrated applications. My main applications are a terminal, emacs, open
office, and the Chrome browser. I do way more with web applications these
days. Bloat is bad not just because of the increased disk and ram usage
(although I do worry about that); bloat is bad because of the complexity. The
more you rely on an Object broker, the more it becomes harder and harder to
fix things when they break --- and things do break, with appalling regularity.
It's the fact that Xfce and Network-Manager uses D-Bus and PolicyKit which is
why I still get asked for my password from time to time even with my
localauthority hack. How do I fix it? Who knows?_

 _Unfortunately wicd isn't fully-featured enough, but it has as a huge win the
fact that it doesn't use PolicyKit; it just uses a simple Unix group
membership check for its access control. Once wicd can handle large numbers of
access points with the same wireless network, I'll be removing network manager
from my system and using wicd instead, because network manager is just too
damn complicated, and relies on too much complex infrastructure which I can't
debug because of the !@#@! D-Bus design. KDE is no better in this regard, and
in fact it may be worse._

 _Why don't I use Openbox? It's too simple. For one thing, it doesn't support
3x3 workspaces. At the end of the day, I want a desktop environment that makes
the things that I do simple. Which means wireless roaming, the terminal,
emacs, open office, and a browser. Anything more than that increases the
memory and disk usage, but worse, it means more infrastructure which can
break, which means I end up having to debug things like PolicyKit. And that's
just not productive time for me. So Xfce seems like the right balance point
for now, although it definitely still has some rough edges.﻿_

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/117091380454742934025/posts/VjbF...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/117091380454742934025/posts/VjbFCa7X5NJ)

Once again: HN needs a proper blockquote markdown.

~~~
bkor
Dbus, PolicyKit and NetworkManager were already used in GNOME 2.x days.

I don't really see how you're quoting this as a good example of why GNOME
doesn't "get it", while the situation is exactly the same as 2.x.

~~~
dredmorbius
The integration of components started getting a lot worse in 3.x.

That said, my situation is much like Ted's. I don't generally use, or find
much value in highly and tightly integrated applications. They're misfeatures.
Most of my work is in terminal windows, editors, remote access tools, and
browsers.

Early in the GNOME and KDE experience, it became very clear that these where
complex systems with many moving parts. My distro of choice (Debian) makes
using things that need to be updated in lockstep (GNOME's home environment,
Red Hat, does this) kind of difficult to sustain. Less so in stable, but very
much so in testing/unstable (where I prefer to live).

The systems (KDE and GNOME) keep getting more complex, they keep stripping out
more power-user features, they keep getting in my way. Really, I've got little
or no need for this.

------
bergie
HN discussion about the piece this is responding to:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4300472>

------
10098
tl;dr: "lalala, we can't hear you, we'll keep doing what we're doing". Looks
like I'm not coming back to gnome in the foreseeable future.

------
mpyne
I find it amusing how Christian says they moved away from "their" ESD to a
standard PulseAudio. ESD was the Enlightenment Sound Daemon (though it may
have been maintained by GNOME hackers at the end), and PulseAudio is only
"standard" insofar as it was included by default with most distros (i.e. ESD
or aRts would have been "standard" under that definition).

KDE at least supports PulseAudio better than ESD but it could as easily have
supported ESD if it were necessary, especially if there was as much support
from ESD devs as was provided by PulseAudio devs (ESD was already in its nadir
before KDE 4.0 thanks to broad usage of gstreamer making ESD redundant for
most audio needs).

~~~
bkor
PulseAudio is used by almost all distributions and GNOME settled on it. ESD
was not used by all distributions, furthermore it had bugs and wasn't
maintained.

Also, Gstreamer is not the same as PulseAudio.

------
m0skit0
Nice article and I agree. I have forced myself to use GNOME3 at work and
honestly I like it. I think most people criticizing it haven't use it enough.
It's a new workflow, and as such, you need some training to get to work as
fast (or in this case faster) as before. Just imagine how first mouse users
felt. It should have been a horrible experience, but good things last. And
IMHO GNOME3 will last. Keep up the good work!

------
ivarkotnik
Not to be a "Negative Nancy", but quite a bit speaks against G3's current
direction in terms of blog posts and participation.

Especially the latter is easy to verify. Go to their mailinglists and see the
level activity, it sure does not look very good. Reading the actual
mailinglists gives sometimes a quite disturbing image as well, with a few
examples already linked in Mr. Ottes mentioned blog post.

~~~
bergie
You can see some decrease in the number of contributors:
<https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/contributors/summary>

However, note that the current slide in the numbers is something that only
happened after February-March 2012, which was when the previous major release
was launched. In 2010 another slide lasted from April until October, so I
suppose there is a need to worry if contributions don't pick up around Sep-
Oct.

That said, the situation for GNOME is certainly different now, given that they
lost their biggest distribution channel in Ubuntu doing their own thing.

~~~
bkor
The number of commits always pick up before a major release and drop off
afterwards. If you try to conclude anything from your analysis, please be a
bit thorough!

~~~
bergie
I thought that was exactly what I said in my comment.

------
PaulHoule
Who speaks for the users?

(Or could it be that there aren't any users?)

~~~
TylerE
That's the real issue.

Gnome and Unity are both targeted at some sort of hypothetical casual linux
user, that doesn't really exist.

Casual users DO exist, but they want iOS, not Linux - or more generally - an
appliance, not a general purpose tool.

~~~
freehunter
This entire conversation is incredibly disappointing. It feels like a giant
echo chamber, a handful of people who don't like Unity/Gnome3 who hear each
other complaining and assume that means the entire Linux universe feels the
same way. Everyone I listen to hates Gnome 3, that must mean everyone hates
Gnome 3!

The truth is, there are people who like Unity and there are people who like
Gnome 3. You're just not hearing them because the negative types are yelling
over top of them. The people who like the new WMs don't have anything to add
to this discussion because the entire discussion is about how those people
don't exist. I feel like if I mention that I'm using Unity right now and I
like it, I feel like I'll be told "no you're not and no you don't, case
closed."

You don't like it. We get it. But claiming that these people don't exist seems
a little disingenuous when obviously they do or Ubuntu wouldn't be quite such
a popular distro. Unless you're suggesting everyone downloads Ubuntu and then
immediately installs a different WM?

~~~
TylerE
There were plenty of people who liked AOL too. Does that mean we should still
be on dialup?

PS: I've read very, very, few comments, on any site, from people who claim to
"like" Unity. At best it's more of a "it's not as bad as everyone says".

~~~
natrius
Unity is the best desktop I've ever used.

~~~
dictus
Have you used other desktops?

~~~
natrius
Windows since 3.1 (though I was never an every day user of Vista and 7), OS X
pre-Lion, GNOME 2, KDE 3.

OS X has a better combination of desktop quality and application support, but
if Unity could magically run OS X apps, I don't think I'd ever use or
recommend anything else.

------
jussij
> maybe the time is ripe for us to strenghten our positions in the server and
> desktop markets?

I always thought GNOME was a desktop system.

Not sure how they plan to take that desktop system and target it as a server
platform?

~~~
wmf
There may be a market for Apple-like Linux server admin tools.
[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/the-server-
simplified-a...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/the-server-simplified-a-
power-users-guide-to-os-x-server/)

~~~
dman
But will people pay for these?

~~~
wmf
Of course, I meant "market" in the Linux sense. People won't pay for any of
this GNOME stuff.

------
RobAley
While I agree with the gist of what he says, I disagree with his assessment of
Unity. Specifically he compares it with Eazel and Ximian, but I think its
different in that it has much more user acceptance, the backing of a much more
popular distro, and is much more refined and mainstream than those projects.
It won't topple gnome, but it will take much more market share.

~~~
ajross
It's not clear to me that it really has significantly more user acceptance.
Unity was likewise the subject of much criticism, and drove many Ubuntu users
away (like me, ironically to Fedora/Gnome3).

What saved Unity, I think, is firstly that it had time to get farther along
the development curve before Canonical released it into the wild as the
default (where Fedora 15 was shockingly rough around the edges) and second
that Ubuntu has become the default development environment for cooking Android
images, drawing a bunch of new users who aren't attached to the old Gnome 2
models.

------
scribblemacher
I used GNOME 3 for awhile. Of all the heavy, DE-style desktops, I like GNOME
3. I use Awesome WM more often because it's lighter and saves precious battery
on my laptop, but GNOME 3 is zippy and mostly stays out of my way.

As long as you can access a terminal quickly, everything else is really window
dressing.

------
debacle
The future of GNOME: <http://mate-desktop.org/>

~~~
bergie
This seems to be a common reaction to new major versions. After KDE4 came out
people also started their own KDE3 fork:
<http://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php>

~~~
mpyne
And that was despite KDE4 being much more similar to KDE3 than GNOME 3 is to
GNOME 2.

------
dman
Could someone using gnome3 here comment on the status of multi monitor
support?

~~~
gdw2
I have my laptop hooked up to two external displays (three displays total) and
it works great. Originally in gnome 3, when it came to virtual workspaces your
non-primary displays were fixed, but they added an option to allow virtual
workspaces on all displays.

~~~
dman
Awesome - thanks!

