Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME [LWN.net]

Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

Posted Aug 11, 2012 12:01 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876)
In reply to: Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME by jospoortvliet
Parent article: Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

> On future touch screen laptops (and desktops!), Shell will be quite nice,

No one has shown yet that touch laptops and desktops work. In fact, Apple did research in this area, and concluded that it did not work. Which is not surprising, because controlling a vertical surface is very tiresome.

> It just isn't particularly good at replacing GNOME 2, but there are others doing that. Mate continues GNOME 2 and XFCE and KDE both can provide a very-close-to-GNOME-2 experience.

It's saddening to see how far some in the free software community are removed from actual users. The average user who wants to get work done, is not interested in learning another desktop environment, they (reasonably) expect to be able to continue to use whatever they use with evolutionary changes. Mate is nice, but no company or organisation in their right mind is going to deploy a software project that is so fundamental to the desktop, that may not exist anymore in one or two years.

Our university is in this situation: it has hundreds of GNOME 2 on Ubuntu users. They cannot just switch to another desktop experience overnight (so, GNOME 3 and Unity are probably out), let alone, force users to switch to another desktop. They cannot install Mint (the usual answer you'll hear around here), since they use Canonical's Landscape management system and Mint is not yet an established player let alone a commercial entity where you can purchase support. tl;dr: they are between a rock and a hard place.

GNOME (and Canonical) probably have not realized what situation they have put large users in by not providing a reasonable migration path, or even beter, evolutionary development. The net result will probably be that some organisations will stick for years with LTS versions of Ubuntu (or RHEL), which sucks for other reasons (hardware support, old software). Others will seriously consider Windows, since, besides its flaws, Windows 7 will be supported for almost forever. And Windows applications will also support Windows 7 for many years to come. Where people have a choice of choosing their platform, some will switch to OS X (in fact, I see this happening in our university all around me).

tl;dr: the average user who is not interested in desktop environments or FLOSS, but just wants a decent workstation system, does not want to switch desktops, distributions, or user interface paradigms overnight.

(Log in to post comments)

Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

Posted Aug 11, 2012 12:16 UTC (Sat) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]

Desktops are never going to be mainly controlled with a touchscreen.

Why?

Because laser mice are 5700 dpi (and improving), while monitors are 96 dpi: hence, you need to move your arm a distance which is *50 TIMES* larger when using a touchscreen, and also keep your arm in a very uncomfortable position.

Also, with a physical keyboard you can rest your hands on it without pressing the keys, while you can't do that with a virtual keyboard.

Mouse and keyboard will only be replaced when it is possible to directly read the user's brain.

If you don't believe this, just try it yourself, by pretending that your desktop monitor is a touchscreen even if isn't, and trying using it as such for a few minutes.

Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

Posted Aug 11, 2012 12:53 UTC (Sat) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

"let alone, force users to switch to another desktop"

I think you're overestimating how hard is is to switch from Gnome 2 to a suitably configured KDE4. They're not radically different approaches; it's much less of a jump than moving to something as conceptually different to either of them as Gnome 3 is.

As long as you can give people something that works roughly the way they're used to they're not going to worry if it looks a bit different. KDE is flexible enough that you should be able to provide people with something that's similar enough to the old setup that they can find their way around.

Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

Posted Aug 11, 2012 14:12 UTC (Sat) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

It's a nice theory, but to make it workable for most people someone would need to deploy a simple "run this" or "install this package" setup tool which configures KDE4 to be as GNOME2-like as possible. It's a hard sell because, in the end, it's all about the applications and it seems like applications associated with GNOME are being gutted into unrecognizably. So, again, it's either "Stick with the old version," or upgrade and lose, or switch to something else and be unhappy.

Dricot: A freasy future for GNOME

Posted Aug 13, 2012 13:10 UTC (Mon) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]

I'm making the switch with my customers. The consensus among them is Gnome 3 sucks and they don't want it. Fortunately they are currently running Gnome 2 + compiz + glx-dock for their basic desktop. The switch to KDE + glx-dock is not too dramatic. They love Lancelot for the menus. Initial feedback is good. I do worry that the Gnome people will ruin applications like Evolution the way they are others like Nautilus.

Upgrading from GNOME 2

Posted Aug 13, 2012 11:35 UTC (Mon) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link]

I haven't used GNOME 3, but when I switched from 10.04 to 12.04 with Unity as the main interface I didn't have to learn very much in the way of a new desktop experience.

The point being that for Ubuntu at least the upgrade path didn't seem very painful. That's only one data point but I think the free software community is doing a better job than it might first seem.

Upgrading from GNOME 2

Posted Aug 13, 2012 17:01 UTC (Mon) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]

That's because the Unity developers actually have to deliver a consumer product they care about every six months, with Shuttleworth putting his own money on the line and keeping them in check, so utterly crazy things are avoided or fixed once noticed.

On the other hand, GNOME 3 apparently has no such constraints, and the GNOME developers are clearly fond of taking full advantage of the situation.