Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 30, 2011 13:41 UTC (Sat) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by mingo
Parent article: Quotes of the week

Crashes do tell us a story about how many users are using it and find it good and find it important enough to report bugs ...

crashes are usually automatically reported; but the Gnome 3 shell doesn't really crash - unless you monkey patch the internals via extensions, the lower levels are pretty much reliable, and the higher levels are written using a high level language that provides nicer error handling than a SIGSEGV at the worse possible time.

what you might see are the "fail whale" style errors, that says that something bad happened to the system (not necessarily a crash) and that the shell was unable to load. these are usually driver issues. yes, drivers tend to suck. yes, Gnome developers are actively helping out figuring out the drivers regressions and missing features and new bugs. it takes time, so for the time being there's a nice fallback user experience.

as for how many people use Gnome 3: only one major distribution has been shipping with Gnome 3; the others have (rightfully or not) decided to wait until a more stable release. the one that's coming in approximately 2 months. do I expect people to get over the whole 3.0 bruahaha? not really; though, having lived through the 1.x -> 2.x cycle I can honestly say that it'll happen.

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 31, 2011 11:17 UTC (Sun) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

Actually, Gnome-shell _does_ crash from time to time. However, It's impossible to report these crashes as such, due to the heap size being in the area of 4GB, so my core files just aren't written. (abrt and similar also refuse to deal with it)

However, these crashes are easily (auto!) recovered from in a nice way. However they are annoying, it's still impossible (for me) to generate a bug report worthy of actually posting. "gnome-shell went away, things were non-responsive for a while, then the shell came back" isn't a bug report that'd see attention anywhere.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 31, 2011 18:48 UTC (Sun) by khc (subscriber, #45209) [Link]

gnome-shell does seem to have memory leaks somewhere, I restart it every few days to keep it in check. Once in a while it doesn't come back from restart, but such is life I guess.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 31, 2011 21:41 UTC (Sun) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

that sounds like an OOM kill. mmh, yes: there are still leaks hanging around. there might be a couple in Clutter, which I haven't backported/released with the stable branch yet. I'll try to do another 1.6 release as soon as I can.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 4, 2011 18:17 UTC (Thu) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]

> as for how many people use Gnome 3: only one major distribution has been shipping with Gnome 3

I lived through GNOME 1 -> 2 transition.

I don't think I will make it through the 2 -> 3 transition.

This time around the GNOME project has made it's clear that people like me are not part of the desired user base and functionality important to me is no where near a priority. Fair enough, it's their choice.

On the next round of distro updates, the big two, which I have used for a long time, are now pushing completely new and less functional desktop shells.

I'll be looking for a new distro with a shell that offers functionality comparable to the now dead GNOME 2.

My point is that waiting for major distros to ship GNOME 3 may not increase the userbase that much - it's bad enough to cause users to flee to other distros.

It'll be interested to see how many other users take the same approach.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 5, 2011 3:50 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

> I'll be looking for a new distro with a shell that offers functionality comparable to the now dead GNOME 2.

I promised not to get involved in GNOME 3 discussions on LWN again, so I'll simply say this: given your stated preferences, you may find XFCE to your liking.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 5, 2011 20:20 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

While I personally like XFCE (Xubuntu setup) as desktop, one should note that it also has some maturity issues still. For example there's the issue with disappearing panels or panel items:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XubuntuPanels

And the apps aren't as full featured / as Gnome or KDE ones, which eventually forced me to move to another desktop, at least until XFCE matures more.

As most desktops allow changing the window manager, I eventually ended up selecting my desktop based on the apps that I use most: terminal, mail and photo manager [1]. Bad experiences on other desktops with less used apps like CD/DVD burning affected this also.

So, I don't quite understand why people select desktop based on its window manager, or complain about one. They should complain if the desktop doesn't work with their favorite standards-compliant replacement window manager...

[1] Browser is of course one of the most used apps, but neither Firefox nor Chrome is tied to any desktop environment.