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Gnome: Staring into the abyss

292 点作者 jonrob将近 13 年前

29 条评论

kijin将近 13 年前
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: some rephrasing.
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abenga将近 13 年前
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.<p>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.
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ebassi将近 13 年前
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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>not everything is bleak and bad.
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hcarvalhoalves将近 13 年前
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.
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mindcrime将近 13 年前
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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yason将近 13 年前
Gnome 3 shattered the experience and momentum.<p>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.<p>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.
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mithaler将近 13 年前
The key problem with Gnome 3 is that it wants to be both general-purpose and opinionated.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This post is wrong to blame tablets and smartphones for the decline. Linux users aren't abandoning desktops; they're abandoning Gnome 3, because it isn't giving them what they want. It's that simple.
loftsy将近 13 年前
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.<p>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.
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mike-cardwell将近 13 年前
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.
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keithpeter将近 13 年前
RHEL 7 will be based on Fedora 18<p><a href="http://rhel7.net/news/98-rhel-7-roadmap" rel="nofollow">http://rhel7.net/news/98-rhel-7-roadmap</a><p>which means we might see RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux/PUIAS users on Gnome 3.6<p><a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18" rel="nofollow">http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18</a><p>Personally, I've worked out I spend little time actually <i>using</i> the overall desktop GUI, so I'm not too sensitive to changes in UI logic. Typical end user I suppose.<p>I suspect the change to systemd will cause rather more fur to fly than the GUI in Enterprise circles.<p>I hope the author of the original article gets a bit of support and finds a direction for his labours.
madmax108将近 13 年前
Damn, I knew Gnome was doing badly, but din't know it was this bad! :|<p>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! :|
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CrazedGeek将近 13 年前
This is the (dead) G+ post by Linus that he refers to: <a href="http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome-for-xfce/" rel="nofollow">http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome...</a>
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sgarrity将近 13 年前
For what it's worth, I've been very pleased with Gnome 3 and the new direction and focus in Gnome interface and design.
aaronh将近 13 年前
<i>whinge</i><p>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?<p>Please don't drive more developers away with more gratuitous Hacker News "X-is-dying" bitching.
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aksx将近 13 年前
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 <i>uncool</i> has started a vicious circle which will lead to its death.
PaulHoule将近 13 年前
to understand the sickness of Gnome you've got to go way way back to the beginning...<p>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"<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>On the other hand, there's been a complete disregard for the people who ~really~ use Linux such as sysadmins and developers.<p>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.
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FlyingSnake将近 13 年前
Since no one mentioned Cinnamon (LinuxMint) let me add that to the discussion.<p>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.<p>LinuxMint is the old Ubuntu which you used to recommend to your friends and family.
MrUnderhill将近 13 年前
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.
CD1212将近 13 年前
In my opinion Gnome needs a completely new start, from the ground up.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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scribblemacher将近 13 年前
I like Gnome 3 in that it made me explore other WM/DE options and think more about what I wanted.<p>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.<p>I installed KDE for my wife to use. It takes KDE an order of magnitude longer to start than Awesome, for all those services and stuff that it's running--you know, all that stuff I'm probably not even using.
UK-AL将近 13 年前
A lot of people are mentioning a lot of distos are moving away from gnome. Infact they are moving away from gnome shell, not gnome. If gnome has problems, we all have problems.
forgottenpaswrd将近 13 年前
GNOME is not necessary anymore. It was in the past, not today.<p>We have Qt that really works, much much better, and with LGPL license.<p>You can run stellarium, VLC or Marble in Mac or Windows without problems.<p>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.<p>In windows you will have a lot of problems too.<p>GTK support for OpenGL, OpenCL was terrible, having to low code everything, while in Qt works as well as with cocoa.<p>Let GTK die and improve(or fork) Qt.
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raikia将近 13 年前
Drop Gnome 3. Convince Mint developers to have Gnome team join in on Cinnamon. Finally make Cinnamon stable. Profit.
rnadna将近 13 年前
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将近 13 年前
This is fallout of a battle-by-proxy between Red Hat (Gnome's <i>de facto</i> sponsor) and Canonical (Unity's sponsor) for the future of Desktop Linux. Canonical seems to be winning.
jebblue将近 13 年前
At some point people will realize that smart phones are great for communication but the desktop and mainframes will continue to be how people get real computing work done and games.
jstalin将近 13 年前
Wow, am I one of the few people who really likes Gnome 3? I use it on my primary home PC on top of Ubuntu 12.04. I love it.
SlipperySlope将近 13 年前
This is the canary in the coal mine with regards to the acceptance of the Microsoft Metro interface on the desktop.
jhaglund将近 13 年前
I wonder how many other people, after reading this, ran: sudo apt-get install gnome