Karen Sandler on her new role at GNOME [LWN.net]

Karen Sandler on her new role at GNOME

Posted Jun 24, 2011 11:08 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
In reply to: Karen Sandler on her new role at GNOME by ringerc
Parent article: Karen Sandler on her new role at GNOME

It's been obvious for a long time that the GNOME developers don't care about their existing users. They've been dumbing it down for a long time to attract new users, without any concern about losing existing users, e.g., removing Emacs key bindings, changing to and from spatial navigation, etc. I have a hard time believing that it's a viable strategy, but who knows.

I spent a few days with GNOME 3, then moved to XFCE. It doesn't seem like that much of a step back from GNOME 2 to me. I'm much more productive with XFCE than with GNOME 3, so I don't care what the GNOME developers do from here on out. I'm not "threatening" to go elsewhere; I've gone. The GNOME developers won't care, and that's fine.

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Karen Sandler on her new role at GNOME

Posted Jun 30, 2011 19:53 UTC (Thu) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]

And ironically they have alienated themselves from all the new-user friendly distros.

How do they expect to attract "Ma & Pa" users? With Fedora?

On the other hand they have alienated long time users by dropping functionality and making common tasks harder or require more clicks/mouse. Taking a hard line on annoying things like the accessibility icon not being removed from the (largely useless and wasted) panel.

Not to mention a bunch of hostile personalities representing the project here on LWN (including attacking the editors and writers).

I still follow planet.gnome.org, but not sure where I will go in the next distro cycle. Ubuntu is dropping GNOME 2. Fedora has swallowed the GNOME 3 pill.

A major set back for the Linux desktop. Hopefully XFCE is up to scratch.