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Dricot: A freasy future for GNOMEDricot: A freasy future for GNOMEPosted Aug 10, 2012 22:47 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)Parent article: Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME
'[W]e should forget about the "Desktop environment" thing'Well, that's a shame, because that's what all your users thought they were using. (Those you have left). But no! It's an OS now, so if you didn't want GNOME to take your entire system over, you can just bugger off. Decentralized online services are important... but is a desktop environment the right project to bootstrap that from? I very much doubt it: it's just that GNOME is there but it seems its developers are bored with the whole desktop environment thing and want to do something else. I don't understand why they don't just start a new project to do that (or join an existing one). I mean, whatever next? Should coreutils forget about the command-line utilities thing, in favour of implementing mobile apps?
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Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 8:48 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
btw, I'm aware that Lionel is not a native English speaker, but, please please take 'freasy' and drop it into a very deep hole. It's got worse phonotactics than any other free software coinage I've heard since 'lignux' or possibly even the original 'freax' name for Linux. 'freasy', to me, is extremely reminiscent mostly of 'greasy' and 'queasy'.
(I'm aware that a proper understanding of the phonotactic value of new words is incredibly hard for non-native speakers to grasp: heck, expensive native-speaking 'branding consultants' seem to have enough trouble with it given the appalling feel of many of the words they come up with... but 'freasy' definitely is waay over there on the bad side.)
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 13:37 UTC (Sat) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
He didn't create the word. The urban dictionary primarily says:
"A combination of the words free + easy.
Usually referring to a woman that seems like an easy target for a one night stand while being free of any negative attributes such as (but not limited to) being fat, ugly/unattractive, diseased, infected, completely intoxicated, etc..."
but also as a third option gives you:
"Freasy, a combination of fried and greasy. Originated in rural Nebraska near Alvo."
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 14:07 UTC (Sat) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]
Urban Dictionary is just about the worst possible reference for anything, though.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 20:52 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Why would that be?
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 12, 2012 8:52 UTC (Sun) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]
It's like a wiki that hasn't realised that you're supposed to revert vandalism rather than giggle at it.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 13, 2012 12:40 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
But if your intention is to find out ways in which people might interpret this phrase, then that's exactly what you want.
(FWIW I've found urban dictionary to be honestly useful when trying to figure out what people mean when they use slang I've not heard of. Wikipedia - not so much)
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 13, 2012 13:02 UTC (Mon) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]
Or ways in which somebody who was drunk in front of their computer once thought it might be funny to convince people that a phrase might be interpreted.
(Honestly, a bunch of the time it just doesn't bear much resemblance to any idiolect I've ever encountered, and more often than not seems to be obsessed with sex acts and/or misogynist slurs. I'm all for descriptive linguistics, but there are limits.)
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 13, 2012 13:22 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Pasting nonsense definitions to urban dictionary that were made up on the spot is kind of a sport.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 15:35 UTC (Sat) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"but is a desktop environment the right project to bootstrap that from?"
GNOME (and also KDE) have long ago surpassed being "a desktop project".
This is also not a new development, the scope has already been expanded several years back and the latest changes are just taking new external realities into consideration.
Some of the previous changes were e.g. adjustments to applications and infrastructure to deal with the expansion of end user scope from desktop to desktops and laptops.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 11, 2012 22:56 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
GNOME and KDE are desktop environments at the root: they may have built other stuff on top of that, but KDE at least is still interested in being useful on a desktop, and at least partly driven by the needs of desktop users. That's good, because it's their *existing userbase*. GNOME seems to have forgotten that (though GNOME has long had a wide streak of developer contempt for users, where 'users' are defined as 'anyone not a GNOME developer': so maybe this is just an existing tendency intensifying into an outright pathology).
(FWIW, I consider laptops to be 'desktops' in this respect: the needs of laptop UIs, other than a few extra devices and lots of hotpluggability, are very similar to those of desktops. Tablets, though, are wildly different.)
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 12, 2012 2:40 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link] though GNOME has long had a wide streak of developer contempt for users, where 'users' are defined as 'anyone not a GNOME developer': so maybe this is just an existing tendency intensifying into an outright pathology So GNOME has contempt for users? News to me! Stating your beliefs as true doesn't make it true. Cool that you're annoyed, but no need to vent.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 12, 2012 6:02 UTC (Sun) by billev2k (subscriber, #32054) [Link]
It sure seems to me that the GNOME developers have contempt for their users. While GNOME 3 implements some great ideas, it's pretty aggressive in its "one thing at a time" approach. And it is pretty lousy for someone (like me) who remembers where things are kept, but not what they're called. And their response to every question about their changes is "get over it".
And the new Nautilus (from the screenshots and descriptions) seems completely useless. But more iPad like -- a screenfull of icons.
Thank goodness for Mint...
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 12, 2012 14:37 UTC (Sun) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] "Stating your beliefs as true doesn't make it true."No, but you saying that doesn't mean nix's comment is untrue either. Let's have another look at this recent bug report shall we, and see whether the attitude of the Gnome devs could be considered to show contempt towards the users they're communicating with. - Firstly, a long established feature, commonly understood, available across multiple desktops, has been summarily broken. Already, that shows a degree of contempt. - Next up, the first response from the Gnome project is to ignore the substance of the bug report completely, and attempt to immediately derail any discussion by telling the reporter off for being mean (which he wasn't). Definitely contemptuous behaviour. - Having rather rudely told the bug reporter to stick to the technical issues, his (and others') technical concerns about scalability, NFS filesystems and so forth are dismissed with "It isn't a problem because we're not going to be stupid". Absolutely dripping with contempt. - Another user weighs in to point out that this seems to be a pattern of behaviour from the Gnome project, and is explicitly told to go away, and that what they've said "is NOT welcome". - Despite having managed to get through some technical discussion on why a search feature (however good it may be) is not a replacement for the removed feature, and doesn't cover the same use cases, the maintainer dismisses the whole bug report by saying that he doesn't "see type-ahead find coming back". There's utter contempt from the project for its users there, and in at least two ways. Firstly; the pointless removal of a useful (and used) feature, and secondly, the attitude that users have to back up what they say with detailed technical arguments and bug reports for every little thing, but the project can just hand down a decision with no such technical supporting case at all. - The whole report ends with another user explaining at some length why the removed feature is useful, used, and widely expected, and that removing it actually is a bug, and the project's representative responds by threatening to delete his account! The fact is that the Gnome project is treating its users with contempt, and saying it doesn't need to make it true - it just reflects the reality that it already is.
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 12, 2012 16:19 UTC (Sun) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]
And I thought that bug report discussion couldn't get any worse, boy was I wrong!
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 12, 2012 16:34 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I've felt contempt from the Gnome3 project as a whole, and from you personally. How is this news to you?
> Cool that you're annoyed
Seriously, how is this news to you?
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 13, 2012 12:40 UTC (Mon) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]
>So GNOME has contempt for users?
They sure come across like they do. I've read many contemptuous posts here on lwn and in the forums. This link is a good summery. http://www.christoph-wickert.de/blog/2011/06/25/gnome-dev...
Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME Posted Aug 12, 2012 13:35 UTC (Sun) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"GNOME and KDE are desktop environments at the root"
Right, that was kind of implicit in "have long surpassed"
They did indeed start out as desktop environment projects but have over time evolved.
Nowadays the majority of contributors is working on applications, only a small subset of each of the two communities is working on workspace components.
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