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Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)Posted Nov 10, 2011 19:35 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106)In reply to: Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) by ovitters Parent article: Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)
I always thought the goal of GNOME was to create a universal desktop. Something for everyone. A swiss army knife that is good in any situation. I'm not sure when that changed to making a desktop that is for only some people who (we think) are the most common. Maybe it didn't, maybe my impression was just always wrong.
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This ship sailed sooooo long ago it's not even funny... Posted Nov 10, 2011 20:17 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] This was done with GNOME 2.0 - when GNOME developers understood that combinatorial explosion from way too many options is killing them. Thus the removed most knobs and slowly added them back over the course of GNOME 2.x development in order to satisfy larger and larger number of users. GNOME 3.o started another cycle. It really looks like we are doomed to repeat this cycle again and again. It happens with browsers (Netscape Communicator becomes Netscape 6 which is so slow and unwieldy it dies and Phoenix^WFirebird^WFirefox takes it's place; then Firefox becomes too bloated and unwieldy and Chromium takes it place), it happens with desktops (first GNOME, then KDE, then GNOME again), etc. Somehow it's tolerated when one project dies and another replaces it but when single project reinvents itself - everyone complain... I'm not sure why kernel does not suffer from the same fate, but my explanation is that it happens because there are a lot of kernel developers - and that means their crap-tolerance can be so low that crap is not growing in codebase too fast and can be removed without revolutions. If someone will try to apply the same rules to GUI development then project will just die stillborn.
This ship sailed sooooo long ago it's not even funny... Posted Nov 11, 2011 3:38 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> I'm not sure why kernel does not suffer from the same fate
Because Linus understands how important the kernel is to its users. Regressions are not tolerated, no matter how expedient or unimportant they seem. The kernel suffers long deprecation cycles and lots of code churn merely because of this ideal.
If only Gnome and KDE had the same maturity, maybe Linux on the Desktop would be happening by now.
This ship sailed sooooo long ago it's not even funny... Posted Nov 11, 2011 9:56 UTC (Fri) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Amen!
If only Gnome and KDE weren't so arrogant and lazy to just screw their loyal users just to get new toys to play with.
Maybe evolution will take care of this in the very long run, as Gnome and KDE will die a slow userbase death (will still exist as developer playgrounds) and XFCE and LXDE will take over.
With projects like the raspberrypie ARM computer and major parts of the developing world not in the possession of dev machines this could change.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 1:34 UTC (Fri) by TerryNewton (guest, #81311) [Link]
> I always thought the goal of GNOME was to create a
> universal desktop. Something for everyone. ... > maybe my impression was just always wrong.
I think perception is key here - in particular the perception that the shell is all there is. It is not.. under the hood I've discovered that Gnome 3 is pretty much like Gnome 2 except it's cleaner. After using gnome tweak tool to enable the nautilus-controlled desktop and window buttons, and adding a panel with an app menu (I use LxPanel) it's basically back to the same old stuff I know and love. The shell is optional.. LxPanel, desktop icons etc work fine with the shell running, or make a plain nautilus/panel session without the shell.
The real question is will the nautilus desktop functionality remain intact?
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 14, 2011 19:24 UTC (Mon) by bats999 (subscriber, #70285) [Link]
I use Nautilus on the desktop also; it makes things a lot more usable for me. Folder shortcuts and script launchers come to mind. I'm sure there's a Shell way of doing this but RTFM? - TL;DR. This is supposed to be an intuitive interface after all. So yeah, I hope the Shell developers don't bury Nautilus before it's time.
(On a different note, I don't think it's accurate to say XFCE doesn't concern itself with new features. The showstopper for me when I tried it years ago was thunar's inability to browse network resources. From what I've gleaned, that's a core feature now.)
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 8:14 UTC (Fri) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]
"Something for everyone"
Ah, the guaranteed recipe for the perfect end-user product :)
Personally I'm glad GNOME is being developed as a product and not as a swiss army knife project... we have enough of the latter already in the realm of DEs.
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