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Dricot: A freasy future for GNOMEDricot: A freasy future for GNOMEPosted Aug 10, 2012 22:19 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME by thebluesgnr Parent article: Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME
Well, it was late. GNOME has never achieved meaningful marketshare. Except that it could still occupy a small niche market of Unix desktops geared towards IT professionals and workstations.
I fail to see such niches in the tablet market. Another case in point - KDE4. They've gone crazy with all the Plasma stuff explicitly targeting tablets. They've even managed to produce one real hardware tablet. Now you can watch them fail.
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Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 0:08 UTC (Sat) by liam (subscriber, #84133) [Link]
Should Apple drop their desktop since they've not had significent marketshare since the 80s?
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 0:47 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Actually that might make sense (and they might be willing to do it). Though it's a good add-on for their main line of projects: iDevices.
You also might notice that MacDesktops are catering to a niche audience. They explicitly don't try to unseat Windows desktop where it's strong (in a corporate setting).
Meanwhile GNOME is losing their existing marketshare (small as it is) and they can't really offer a strong competitive product.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 6:48 UTC (Sat) by liam (subscriber, #84133) [Link]
You might have missed the relatively recent news that the core Apple users (design-types) have been unhappy with some recent decisions with OSX (the FCP interface change, the lack of a new mac pro for last few years...there were some more but I happen to remember these because of the ars article about mac pro alternatives). So, you might be right about Apple dropping the desktop as a significent venture.
Lastly, you said that Gnome had a niche with UNIX IT people (not exactly wacom wielders but still a niche). Is there convincing evidence that that has disappeared?
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 7:29 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> You might have missed the relatively recent news that the core Apple users (design-types) have been unhappy with some recent decisions with OSX (the FCP interface change, the lack of a new mac pro for last few years...there were some more but I happen to remember these because of the ars article about mac pro alternatives).
Apple used to serve that demographic, but is moving more and more to the low-end mass consumer market software-wise. I used Aperture (Apple's raw editing software) before, nowadays, it is mostly neglected, unstable, and slow. In the meanwhile, I moved to Lightroom, since Adobe seems to care for that market. Apple invests more in 'toy variants' of FCP and Aperture, namely iMovie and iPhoto. My wife uses both, and they are not really able to handle large amounts of material, and lack in many areas (e.g. geocoding in iPhoto, because low-end users alls use an iPhone as their photo camera).
The operating system is also slowly changing towards non-power users. E.g. they replaced the sane Exposé/Spaces by Mission Control in 10.7, which sucks, and full-screen apps (also introduced in 10.7) don't work with multiple monitors (one screen is just a grey canvas). Also, Mountain Lion (10.8), while still being very usable, slowly made the next step towards iOSification: by default it only runs signed applications or applications from the app store. I won't be surprised if the next version runs only app store applications by default.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 12:57 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> Also, Mountain Lion (10.8), while still being very usable, slowly made the next step towards iOSification: by default it only runs signed applications or applications from the app store.
oops, someone just fell into the FUD machine. This is definitively not true.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 13:34 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
It does not want ordinary users to disable this protection though. For instance, when libreoffice 3.6 was released, I installed it and it would not run because the code was not signed...
So I go to disable this protection and a dialog pops up that says something along the lines of this: "You can actually ctrl-click if you just want to run some application while this protection is enabled. Do you still want to disable it?"
I did not disable the protection, and it made some kind of entry in its database that says LO is allowed to run forever on this computer, and everything kept on working.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 17:18 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
everything I download from the internet runs just fine...
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 18:09 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
Check your security settings. Either 'Allow applications downloaded from' is set to 'Anywhere', or you are only downloading signed applications ;).
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 18:07 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
I didn't fall for any FUD.
I used Mountain Lion since the earliest beta's, and it is true. By default it only runs signed applications (and applications from the app store are, by requirement signed). Running an unsigned application will give an error. However, you *can* disable this in the security settings, so that it will run every application.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 20:05 UTC (Sat) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
That's not really accurate, though.
It only prevents applications downloaded from the Internet that are /completely/ unsigned (and only if the program that did the downloading marked them as such). Self signed apps will receive a scary warning, but can still be opened, while apps signed with an Apple-provided certificate will work fine (doesn't matter if they're distributed via the App Store).
This means that already-run apps will work just fine, as would apps that are acquired via physical media (such as CD/DVD/flash sticks).
The reporting has done a fairly poor job of explaining exactly what it restricts and how it functions, unfortunately.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 7:53 UTC (Sat) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]
It has not disappeared, nobody is claiming that (not even the guy you're replying to, if you read again what he wrote). But it has shrunk considerably. "Convincing evidence"? It depends on how high you put the bar, i.e. if you'll be convinced by a thorough survey of all (ex) Gnome users that won't happen any time soon.
My personal anecdotal evidence (= every Linux user I know has moved to something else, like XFCE, after Gnome 3 was out) plus all the comments (thousands of them, some quite ... energetic :) by people disapproving of the new "philosophy", plus a surge in alternatives (Unity, MATE, Cinnamon, and see the current Nautilus-forking fest) is enough to convince me that Gnome is indeed losing its existing user and developer base, that the Linux desktop is now much more fragmented than it was just a few months ago and that it will stay that way for quite some time. Unfortunately.
Rehdon
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 15:18 UTC (Sat) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"with all the Plasma stuff explicitly targeting tablets"
Plasma is not targetting any specific form factor or device in particular.
The sole fact that work on Plasma started way earlier than any tablet appearing on the consumer scene should make it obvious that is cannot be "explicitly targeting tablets"
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 13, 2012 12:31 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
He's not saying that Plasma targets tablets; he's just talking about the Plasma stuff that does, ie. Plasma Active which has had a fair bit of press recently.
Think about the sentence if it were "with software explicitly targeting tablets" - that's not saying that all software targets tablets.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 13, 2012 15:08 UTC (Mon) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
Ah, I see.
"gone crazy" and "all the Plasma stuff" threw me off then.
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