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Day: GNOME OSDay: GNOME OSPosted Aug 8, 2012 7:48 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Day: GNOME OS by kragil Parent article: Day: GNOME OS
> XP had the applications people wanted, that is not Linux fault.
> People just want their apps. So the Gnome people (Red Hat) should just stop all that nonsense and just write apps for Qt, instead of starting all over again on every possible level based on nearly abandoned GTK.
The logic doesn't follow. If people wanted XP because of the applications then what benefit would Gnome get by abandoning everything and starting over with QT? By getting rid of all your applications then you get lots of applications? Doesn't make sense. It would make more sense if your arguing that Gnome should be re-written using Winelib and Mono so that it gains greater compatibility with existing Windows applications.
Abandoning a existing and functional GTK-based platform for QT is what Nokia tried to do with their Linux distribution and it turned out to be a disaster. Now all the QT developers are rapidly being laid off, the QT copyrights are in the hands of a failing corporation that exists as little more then a Microsoft vassal and the people (KDE, etc) that depended on QT's propriety variants to fund the development of their platform of choice now are on their own.
Toolkit changes doesn't seem like likely to yield much of a benefit.
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Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 8:29 UTC (Wed) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
Building a house on sand? GTK is dying/certainly stagnating. Qt will have a healthy ecosystem even without Nokia(or RIM or HP). And Qt5 is years ahead of GTK. At this rate maybe in 2020 GTK can do what Qt can do now.
Everything the current Gnome dev touch turns to crap, so maybe I should be careful what I wish for. Only the anouncement of the new nautilus changes produced a fork (nemo) in no time.
And they obviously want to rewrite everything anyways .. so?
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 8:45 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Building a house on sand? GTK is dying/certainly stagnating. Qt will have a healthy ecosystem even without Nokia(or RIM or HP).
QT being healthy without QT devs remains to be seen. But I with all the luck to them.
I still think that the toolkit is relatively irrelevant to other aspects of the platform and it always will be.
> . Only the anouncement of the new nautilus changes produced a fork (nemo) in no time.
People have created forks of Gnome stuff since back Gnome 1.x days as a sort of protest. Almost all of them die fairly quickly after the first release, but I don't think it's a terrible thing that people are that passionate about Gnome software.
Maybe if you go off and start a QT version of Gnome then maybe then you can prove to people how awesome QT can be without KDE. Personally I think it would be easier just to stick with KDE and try to make that more Gnome-like if that is truly your goal.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 8:46 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
er, sorry:
But I with all the luck to them. means to read: But I wish all the luck to them.
And I am serious about that.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 9:06 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] People have created forks of Gnome stuff since back Gnome 1.x days as a sort of protest. FWIW, as a GNOME user since those days, I can't remember noticing any such forks, until GNOME 3. The first time I noticed GNOME having forks was Mint/Cinnamon and then MATE, both of which appear have built up sufficient momentum to achieve escape velocity, and be more than protest "flash in the pan" projects.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 9:46 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
GoneME is the one that generated the most fervor that I can remember:
http://www.akcaagac.com/index_goneme.html
The funny thing is that looking back to his complaints a great number of them have been addressed since 2004. Gconf is replaced by dconf, although probably it is something he would consider worse. Mozilla has been replaced by KHTML derived Webkit. Dependencies for Gnome have been much streamlined. Spatial Nautilus is gone. And a few other details.
I know that abandoning things like Sawfish and going with something much simpler really really pissed off a huge number of people for a very long time. I didn't really pay much attention to Linux political things back when I first started using Linux (and was delighted to learn I didn't need Gnome to run Enlightenment.) but I was still seeing Gnome 2 hate coming from people who liked all the configuration options and scripting that was available for Gnome 1.x up until a couple years ago.
Gnome forks as a response to Gnome 3 really amount to Cinnamon and Mate.
Mate should of been completely unnecessary. Looking back it's a stupid mistake of Gnome project to not make Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 install-able in parallel. Once they achieve the ability to easily install Gnome 2 on everybody's system that cares about it they will probably just go into maintenance mode.
Unity/XFCE et al started long before Gnome 3.
Cinnamon is a real swear-to-goodness fork of Gnome Shell to make it more Gnome 2 like. I actually see that going somewhere eventually. I was hoping they could it just through extensions, but I guess that was not possible.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 16:19 UTC (Wed) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]
> I know that abandoning things like Sawfish and going with something much simpler really really pissed off a huge number of people for a very long time.
I know I was one of them. Although, I was able to replace metacity with sawfish in the gnome environment, even though it seemed that gnome kept making switching the window-manager harder at each release. I even eventually did:
# rm /usr/bin/metacity
and that worked well :-)
> Looking back it's a stupid mistake of Gnome project to not make Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 install-able in parallel.
And this has been my #1 complaint about Gnome3. I just don't work well with the gnome3 workflow. I really liked gnome2 and after a decade of tweaks I really streamlined my workflow with it. Gnome3 destroyed that. I've said it in the past and I'll say it again...
The biggest thing I hate about Gnome3 is that it took gnome2 away from me.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 23:42 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
May I ask what you think about Fallback mode? Once someone pointed out that you have to hold down Alt while clicking on the panels to customize them, I felt right at home.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 9:36 UTC (Wed) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] Abandoning a existing and functional GTK-based platform for QT is what Nokia tried to do with their Linux distribution and it turned out to be a disaster.Seems to me that had more to do with other things going on at Nokia than whether Qt was an effective toolkit or not. Not that I think GNOME making a leap to Qt would be helpful though - it would just take a very long time, push a bunch of developers away from the project and probably not actually achieve anything anyway. Those calling for it probably don't know what they are asking for.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 10:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I think the toolkit is largely irrelevant.
I believe this because it appears that things like GTK vs QT is dwarfed by other, far more important, issues related to the Linux platform as a whole. And as such is seems very likely to me that switching toolkits will yield no positive net benefit; yet require a massive amount of work. Work that is better spent addressing other issues and improving existing applications.
Day: GNOME OS Posted Aug 8, 2012 13:45 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
It seems to me that the gnome, too, decided that GTK isn't the right toolkit to create attractive applications for a mobile environment -- hence Clutter. And, of course, Qt isn't just a toolkit, it's way more that than, and Nokia actually, while using Qt, switched toolkits a couple more times, from QWidget-based DUI (might be mistaken about the official name, we used it for Fremantle office on the N900) to libmeegotouch to Meego QML Components.
Having used it, I have to say that libmeegotouch in particular was a travesty of everything that makes Qt so wonderful to work with. Bad documents, ghastly performance, horrible API.
QML is pretty nice, though.
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