13 ms·

Gnome: Staring into the abyss

292 points by jonrob 14y ago

mike-cardwell 14y ago
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.
- ch0wn 14y ago
  But it applies to the foundation Unity is built upon, as well: GTK has 1 person working full-time on it (me). Glib doesn’t even have that. I think evolution is in a similar situation (a complete email client). Also, competition is always good.
  - mike-cardwell 14y ago
    I'm confident that Canonical is on top of this.
    - buster 14y ago
      Nahh, Evolution is not the default client anymore (sadly, i prefer it to thunderbird) and Unity is built on top of compiz, where gnome-shell uses mutter. :(
      - mseepgood 14y ago
        Compiz is not without problems either: http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/ http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/ And Mozilla has left Thunderbird more or less. Lack of developer power seems to be a pattern within open source desktop projects.
        buster 14y ago
        Yes, knew about compiz, that's why it's a shame that Canonical chose this direction instead of putting more developer efforts into the gnome stuff.
        acabal 14y ago
        I think it's the other way around--it's a shame Gnome chose to built yet-another-window-manager instead of building upon the solid and tested Compiz. Very NIH-y of them. (Though Compiz most certainly has been on a measurable decline since the Natty days. The same laptop ran Natty without a hiccup, but it runs Gnome Classic on Precise with at least one Compiz crash every few hours. Not to mention the many bugs introduced into plugins since Natty--window previews and wobbly windows, I'm looking at you.)
        mseepgood 14y ago
        No. Mutter is not "yet-another-window-manager". It's an evolution of the Metacity code base (Mutter = Metacity + Clutter). So the Gnome developers basically continued using their window manager instead of hopping to yet-another-window-manager.
        buster 14y ago
        Well... http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402 http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402 Sooo, all others move away from compiz (which is poorly maintained anyway).
        slurgfest 14y ago
        Although Compiz is very, very customizable and hasn't changed all that much in years, so one would think it would appeal to all the people who are screaming about losing customizability and having everything change underneath them.
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - danieldk 14y ago
    Note that Unity 2D is based on Qt and also works pretty well these days. It seems that they have spread the risks somewhat. I do thing the general developments in the ecosystem are somewhat worrying. Nokia's involvement in Qt is becoming more clouded, and everyone is distracted by tablets and smartphones (and naturally, the money streams go into those directions). That said, that's also an opportunity for more consolidation, so if Canonical play their cards right, the open source desktop may become more single minded and effective.
    - Mr_T_ 14y ago
      Unity 2D is deprecated: http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/16/ubuntu-tv-weekly-update-2/ http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/16/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u... "Since Unity 2D was depreciated for Ubuntu 12.10, much work is being done to port Ubuntu TV to Unity 3D" http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/20/ubuntu-tv-weekly-update-3/ http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/20/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u... "Continued progress removing Qt and replacing with Nux" http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5OTA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5O... "Unity 2D To Go Away In Ubuntu 12.10"
      - reirob 14y ago
        When Unity 2D will not be available, does it mean that Ubuntu will NOT run as a VirtualBox guest? I recently switched from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 in VirtualBox - mostly for development. I start to like Unity. But Ubuntu 12.04 is much slower than 10.04, in terms of GUI and responsiveness. So what are Ubuntu's plans for GUI performance?
        Mr_T_ 14y ago
        I guess they will do the same as Gnome Shell and use LLVMpipe
        reirob 14y ago
        Many thanks for this hint. I never heard about LLVMpipe before and looked up what it means. The article that I found about is here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxMjI http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM... What I find interesting in this article is the following: "[...] For those not familiar with the open-source LLVMpipe driver to begin with, read my original article on LLVMpipe from last year. Its performance has improved in the two or so years I have been closely monitoring this unique driver and fairs better with newer CPUs. [...]" "[...] This testing was being done with the un-accelerated Cirrus X.Org driver (xf86-video-cirrus) in the KVM/QEMU guest from an Ubuntu 11.10 host. When allowing the Fedora Rawhide guest to only access one CPU core and 1GB of system memory, the performance of GNOME Shell over LLVMpipe was choppy and not as fluid as the GNOME3 panel fall-back or obviously when taking advantage of GPU hardware acceleration on bare metal. When allowing the virtual machine to take advantage of two CPU cores, the experience was much better, with still only 1GB of RAM. Red Hat has reported that using SPICE also improves the experience for GNOME Shell on this Gallium3D-based software driver. [...]"
- Mr_T_ 14y ago
  Unity shares a lot of core infrastructure with Gnome. If Gnome has problems, Unity+Ubuntu will have problems as well. And Unity has the same bus factor and even less community developers or developers from other companies: if Canonical is hit by a bus (which is not entirely unlikely if it doesn't become profitable) the project is doomed.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    The lion's share of complaints about Unity and Gnome have always been from users staring at pixels, not complaints about the underlying libraries. Even this post is about manpower, not the libraries being unusable.
- csense 14y ago
  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.
  - fdr 14y ago
    A number of my coworkers use Unity, and I do too. We're all programmers. Other than it being frustratingly buggy and with a klunky visual design, the general consensus is "meh, went better than I expected". Granted, programmers have a simple workload: web browser, text editor, terminal, done. One thing I like about Unity is how keyboard driven it can be: the application search is not too bad, and the "HUD" feature actually seems appealing except that it stole my right-hand-alt, which I use as an emacs's "meta" key. But other than that, I played with it a bit and thought it was a great way to get away from the hierarchical pull-down menu, which I loathe.
CrazedGeek 14y ago
This is the (dead) G+ post by Linus that he refers to: http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome-for-xfce/ http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome...
- Mr_T_ 14y ago
  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/UkoAaLDpF4i https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...
  - VMG 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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/ http://i3wm.org/
      - bashinator 14y ago
        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 http://www.peereboom.us/scrotwm/html/scrotwm.html
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
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.
- martey 14y ago
  Your comment seems to be talking about GTK (the user interface library, which like Qt, is also LGPL licensed), while the original post is about the GNOME desktop environment. Since the latter does not run in Windows or OS X, your comment is sort of off-topic.
- shaunxcode 14y ago
  Hey I think the copy behavior in inkscape is on purpose. "duplicate" now does what you would expect copy to do?
- exDM69 14y ago
  > 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.
kijin 14y ago
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_ 14y ago
  > 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.
  - ilja 14y ago
    Whether you like it or not, power users are probably the only audience left for a linux DE that's no longer the default on the most newbie friendly distro's. The rest of the world is never going to see it. Open source is very much about scratching one's own itch
madmax108 14y ago
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! :|
- csense 14y ago
  Two words: Linux Mint (an Ubuntu derivative) with Cinnamon. Basically Linux Mint is the distro for people who used to like Ubuntu, but don't want unfamiliar postmodern GUI metaphors in Unity or Gnome 3 shoved down their throats.
  - Mr_T_ 14y ago
    99% of Cinnamon is Gnome 3, the other 1% is heavily modified JavaScript wiring.
    - bundyo 14y ago
      Which is rather good - the features of Gnome 3 + the look and usability of Gnome 2.
- zalew 14y ago
  One word: Xfce
  - mseepgood 14y ago
    Xfce has more manpower than Gnome? Xfce has achieved the transition to GTK+ 3? (both rhetorical questions)
    - tytso 14y ago
      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).
abenga 14y ago
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.
- brusch 14y ago
  Me too - I really like GNOME 3. After installing I had to go back to GNOME 2 (on a client - installation problems) and if felt old and boring - like going back to Windows XP (from Windows 7)
- vidarh 14y ago
  I'm curious - did you set up "full" Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell, or is it the default Ubuntu install (with Unity)? If the full thing, what made you pick that over Unity? I "just" did a default install with the expectation that Unity would drive me crazy and that I'd end up replacing everything, but in the end I found it very suitable for how I work (browser + terminal with tons of tabs maximized; leaving one workspace free for the rare other apps I end up using)
  - abenga 14y ago
    I usually do an "apt-get install gnome" on top of the default Ubuntu desktop. I used to run GNOME shell builds even before it was generally available and got to love it. I'm sure that given time I'd grow to not mind Unity, but for me GNOME feels designed as a more coherent whole than Unity. The vanishing top menu on Unity also sucks, IMO.
- obtu 14y ago
  I love it, because it feels streamlined and gets out of the way. I don't really care to participate in flames (the sort that Benjamin linked from his blog post), so I'll just voice some support here.
CD1212 14y ago
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.
- Mr_T_ 14y ago
  > a MIT or LGPL license GTK is LGPL licensed.
- progrock 14y ago
  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.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
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.
- pkmays 14y ago
  Sounds about right. I think a lot of developers buy a MacBook with the intention of dual booting to Linux, but end up just sticking with OSX.
  - Tyr42 14y ago
    Guilty of that here. There isn't much incentive really, other than perhaps getting Xmonad running, and it'll end up with some stuff breaking. I've got a nice bash shell, steam works and I can play portal, and it's good enough.
- octotoad 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    > 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.
ebassi 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    "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.
loftsy 14y ago
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 14y ago
  > 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 14y ago
    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.
UK-AL 14y ago
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.
keithpeter 14y ago
RHEL 7 will be based on Fedora 18 http://rhel7.net/news/98-rhel-7-roadmap 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 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.
MrUnderhill 14y ago
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.
yason 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
sgarrity 14y ago
For what it's worth, I've been very pleased with Gnome 3 and the new direction and focus in Gnome interface and design.
PaulHoule 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      You dont let your users down just because someone else changed their license.
FlyingSnake 14y ago
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.
SlipperySlope 14y ago
This is the canary in the coal mine with regards to the acceptance of the Microsoft Metro interface on the desktop.
mindcrime 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
mithaler 14y ago
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.
jhaglund 14y ago
I wonder how many other people, after reading this, ran: sudo apt-get install gnome
scribblemacher 14y ago
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.
aksx 14y ago
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.
raikia 14y ago
Drop Gnome 3. Convince Mint developers to have Gnome team join in on Cinnamon. Finally make Cinnamon stable. Profit.
aaronh 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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"
jstalin 14y ago
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.
jebblue 14y ago
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.
rnadna 14y ago
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 14y ago
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.

292 points by jonrob 14y ago

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.

ch0wn 14y ago
But it applies to the foundation Unity is built upon, as well: GTK has 1 person working full-time on it (me). Glib doesn’t even have that. I think evolution is in a similar situation (a complete email client). Also, competition is always good.
- mike-cardwell 14y ago
  I'm confident that Canonical is on top of this.
  - buster 14y ago
    Nahh, Evolution is not the default client anymore (sadly, i prefer it to thunderbird) and Unity is built on top of compiz, where gnome-shell uses mutter. :(
    - mseepgood 14y ago
      Compiz is not without problems either: http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/ http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/ And Mozilla has left Thunderbird more or less. Lack of developer power seems to be a pattern within open source desktop projects.
      - buster 14y ago
        Yes, knew about compiz, that's why it's a shame that Canonical chose this direction instead of putting more developer efforts into the gnome stuff.
        acabal 14y ago
        I think it's the other way around--it's a shame Gnome chose to built yet-another-window-manager instead of building upon the solid and tested Compiz. Very NIH-y of them. (Though Compiz most certainly has been on a measurable decline since the Natty days. The same laptop ran Natty without a hiccup, but it runs Gnome Classic on Precise with at least one Compiz crash every few hours. Not to mention the many bugs introduced into plugins since Natty--window previews and wobbly windows, I'm looking at you.)
        mseepgood 14y ago
        No. Mutter is not "yet-another-window-manager". It's an evolution of the Metacity code base (Mutter = Metacity + Clutter). So the Gnome developers basically continued using their window manager instead of hopping to yet-another-window-manager.
        buster 14y ago
        Well... http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402 http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/rip-compiz/3402 Sooo, all others move away from compiz (which is poorly maintained anyway).
        slurgfest 14y ago
        Although Compiz is very, very customizable and hasn't changed all that much in years, so one would think it would appeal to all the people who are screaming about losing customizability and having everything change underneath them.
        deleted 14y ago
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- danieldk 14y ago
  Note that Unity 2D is based on Qt and also works pretty well these days. It seems that they have spread the risks somewhat. I do thing the general developments in the ecosystem are somewhat worrying. Nokia's involvement in Qt is becoming more clouded, and everyone is distracted by tablets and smartphones (and naturally, the money streams go into those directions). That said, that's also an opportunity for more consolidation, so if Canonical play their cards right, the open source desktop may become more single minded and effective.
  - Mr_T_ 14y ago
    Unity 2D is deprecated: http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/16/ubuntu-tv-weekly-update-2/ http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/16/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u... "Since Unity 2D was depreciated for Ubuntu 12.10, much work is being done to port Ubuntu TV to Unity 3D" http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/20/ubuntu-tv-weekly-update-3/ http://www.doadjustyourset.com/2012/07/20/ubuntu-tv-weekly-u... "Continued progress removing Qt and replacing with Nux" http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5OTA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5O... "Unity 2D To Go Away In Ubuntu 12.10"
    - reirob 14y ago
      When Unity 2D will not be available, does it mean that Ubuntu will NOT run as a VirtualBox guest? I recently switched from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 in VirtualBox - mostly for development. I start to like Unity. But Ubuntu 12.04 is much slower than 10.04, in terms of GUI and responsiveness. So what are Ubuntu's plans for GUI performance?
      - Mr_T_ 14y ago
        I guess they will do the same as Gnome Shell and use LLVMpipe
        reirob 14y ago
        Many thanks for this hint. I never heard about LLVMpipe before and looked up what it means. The article that I found about is here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxMjI http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM... What I find interesting in this article is the following: "[...] For those not familiar with the open-source LLVMpipe driver to begin with, read my original article on LLVMpipe from last year. Its performance has improved in the two or so years I have been closely monitoring this unique driver and fairs better with newer CPUs. [...]" "[...] This testing was being done with the un-accelerated Cirrus X.Org driver (xf86-video-cirrus) in the KVM/QEMU guest from an Ubuntu 11.10 host. When allowing the Fedora Rawhide guest to only access one CPU core and 1GB of system memory, the performance of GNOME Shell over LLVMpipe was choppy and not as fluid as the GNOME3 panel fall-back or obviously when taking advantage of GPU hardware acceleration on bare metal. When allowing the virtual machine to take advantage of two CPU cores, the experience was much better, with still only 1GB of RAM. Red Hat has reported that using SPICE also improves the experience for GNOME Shell on this Gallium3D-based software driver. [...]"
Mr_T_ 14y ago
Unity shares a lot of core infrastructure with Gnome. If Gnome has problems, Unity+Ubuntu will have problems as well. And Unity has the same bus factor and even less community developers or developers from other companies: if Canonical is hit by a bus (which is not entirely unlikely if it doesn't become profitable) the project is doomed.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  The lion's share of complaints about Unity and Gnome have always been from users staring at pixels, not complaints about the underlying libraries. Even this post is about manpower, not the libraries being unusable.
csense 14y ago
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.
- fdr 14y ago
  A number of my coworkers use Unity, and I do too. We're all programmers. Other than it being frustratingly buggy and with a klunky visual design, the general consensus is "meh, went better than I expected". Granted, programmers have a simple workload: web browser, text editor, terminal, done. One thing I like about Unity is how keyboard driven it can be: the application search is not too bad, and the "HUD" feature actually seems appealing except that it stole my right-hand-alt, which I use as an emacs's "meta" key. But other than that, I played with it a bit and thought it was a great way to get away from the hierarchical pull-down menu, which I loathe.

CrazedGeek 14y ago

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

Mr_T_ 14y ago
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/UkoAaLDpF4i https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...
- VMG 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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/ http://i3wm.org/
    - bashinator 14y ago
      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 http://www.peereboom.us/scrotwm/html/scrotwm.html

forgottenpaswrd 14y ago

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.

martey 14y ago
Your comment seems to be talking about GTK (the user interface library, which like Qt, is also LGPL licensed), while the original post is about the GNOME desktop environment. Since the latter does not run in Windows or OS X, your comment is sort of off-topic.
shaunxcode 14y ago
Hey I think the copy behavior in inkscape is on purpose. "duplicate" now does what you would expect copy to do?
exDM69 14y ago
> 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.

kijin 14y ago

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_ 14y ago
> 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.
- ilja 14y ago
  Whether you like it or not, power users are probably the only audience left for a linux DE that's no longer the default on the most newbie friendly distro's. The rest of the world is never going to see it. Open source is very much about scratching one's own itch

madmax108 14y ago

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! :|

csense 14y ago
Two words: Linux Mint (an Ubuntu derivative) with Cinnamon. Basically Linux Mint is the distro for people who used to like Ubuntu, but don't want unfamiliar postmodern GUI metaphors in Unity or Gnome 3 shoved down their throats.
- Mr_T_ 14y ago
  99% of Cinnamon is Gnome 3, the other 1% is heavily modified JavaScript wiring.
  - bundyo 14y ago
    Which is rather good - the features of Gnome 3 + the look and usability of Gnome 2.
zalew 14y ago
One word: Xfce
- mseepgood 14y ago
  Xfce has more manpower than Gnome? Xfce has achieved the transition to GTK+ 3? (both rhetorical questions)
  - tytso 14y ago
    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).

abenga 14y ago

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.

brusch 14y ago
Me too - I really like GNOME 3. After installing I had to go back to GNOME 2 (on a client - installation problems) and if felt old and boring - like going back to Windows XP (from Windows 7)
vidarh 14y ago
I'm curious - did you set up "full" Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell, or is it the default Ubuntu install (with Unity)? If the full thing, what made you pick that over Unity? I "just" did a default install with the expectation that Unity would drive me crazy and that I'd end up replacing everything, but in the end I found it very suitable for how I work (browser + terminal with tons of tabs maximized; leaving one workspace free for the rare other apps I end up using)
- abenga 14y ago
  I usually do an "apt-get install gnome" on top of the default Ubuntu desktop. I used to run GNOME shell builds even before it was generally available and got to love it. I'm sure that given time I'd grow to not mind Unity, but for me GNOME feels designed as a more coherent whole than Unity. The vanishing top menu on Unity also sucks, IMO.
obtu 14y ago
I love it, because it feels streamlined and gets out of the way. I don't really care to participate in flames (the sort that Benjamin linked from his blog post), so I'll just voice some support here.

CD1212 14y ago

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.

Mr_T_ 14y ago
> a MIT or LGPL license GTK is LGPL licensed.
progrock 14y ago
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.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

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.

pkmays 14y ago
Sounds about right. I think a lot of developers buy a MacBook with the intention of dual booting to Linux, but end up just sticking with OSX.
- Tyr42 14y ago
  Guilty of that here. There isn't much incentive really, other than perhaps getting Xmonad running, and it'll end up with some stuff breaking. I've got a nice bash shell, steam works and I can play portal, and it's good enough.
octotoad 14y ago
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 14y ago
  > 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.

ebassi 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  "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.

loftsy 14y ago

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 14y ago
> 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 14y ago
  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.

UK-AL 14y ago

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.

keithpeter 14y ago

RHEL 7 will be based on Fedora 18 http://rhel7.net/news/98-rhel-7-roadmap 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 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.

MrUnderhill 14y ago

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.

yason 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

sgarrity 14y ago

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

PaulHoule 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    You dont let your users down just because someone else changed their license.

FlyingSnake 14y ago

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.

SlipperySlope 14y ago

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

mindcrime 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.

mithaler 14y ago

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.

jhaglund 14y ago

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

scribblemacher 14y ago

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.

aksx 14y ago

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.

raikia 14y ago

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

aaronh 14y ago

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 14y ago
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"

jstalin 14y ago

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.

jebblue 14y ago

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.

rnadna 14y ago

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 14y ago

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.