Day: GNOME OS [LWN.net]

Day: GNOME OS

Posted Aug 8, 2012 8:45 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Day: GNOME OS by kragil
Parent article: Day: GNOME OS

> 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.

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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 Mozilla has been replaced by KHTML derived Webkit.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
# ln -s /usr/bin/sawfish /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.