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Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power usersMena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power usersPosted Nov 11, 2012 19:11 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)In reply to: Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users by Zizzle Parent article: Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users
To be honest, I feel like LWN should have run the igurublog post instead of Federico Mena-Quintero and Aaron Seigo's responses. The latter just don't contain very much information. I mean, animated cat GIFs? Really? The whole content of these posts could be summed up in a sentence as "haters gonna hate" with no loss of information.
The igurublog post, on the other hand, really points out some disturbing trends in KDE, Unity, and GNOME3. Basically, the Linux desktop has somewhat lost its identity. A lot of bad ideas have slithered over from the proprietary systems, like an obsession with "branding," an unwillingness to cooperate with other free software projects, the addition of corporate advertisements, and a progressive dumbing down. These projects are supposed to be community projects, but they don't feel like it any more. Input from folks outside the project, no matter how well-argued it is or who makes it, is just sent to "a mental /dev/null" as Federico so eloquently puts it. Some of us came over to Linux to avoid this stuff; to see it start cropping up here is disturbing.
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Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users Posted Nov 12, 2012 7:43 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Yes, the iguru posting was deeply insightful, and many of the comments too.
Maybe forking Gnome 3 would have a better outcome than MATE, because it wouldn't seem to have a mandate to stay exactly the same. (Of course lots of things could be improved in Gnome 2.) I hoped Cinnamon was that fork, but it appears meant to surf on top of Gnome 3. Maybe they can still rescue useful components as the Gnome crew retires them.
The GTK3 problem makes it hard to keep a stable theming platform.
Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users Posted Nov 12, 2012 15:27 UTC (Mon) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]
If you could chose between a stable theming platform that nobody understands, doesn't provide alpha transparency, uses an arcane syntax and is crash-prone and a powerful machinery built on standards that is working to give you the ability to tune everything, which one would you chose?
Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users Posted Nov 12, 2012 17:30 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Are you suggesting the latter actually exists?
Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users Posted Nov 12, 2012 19:35 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] It's in the works. You can chip in, if you like.
Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users Posted Nov 13, 2012 17:14 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>It's in the works. You can chip in, if you like.
In other words, 'no'.
Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users Posted Nov 12, 2012 19:48 UTC (Mon) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]
AFAIK Cinnamon is a real fork, not a dressed up Gnome 2 look-alike (that was LM MGSE, where they used extensions to mimick a Gnome 2 environment based on Gnome Shell). As you can read in the iguru post, they suffer from the current GTK3 instability, true, but otoh the Linux Mint RC is just now out and Cinnamon 1.6 looks sweet:
http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_nadia_whatsnew.php
Really looking forward to this release :)
Rehdon
Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users Posted Nov 12, 2012 16:44 UTC (Mon) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
It's not actually true for KDE. We do not dismiss features or break stuff based on branding ideas, for example.
If we find that an option in the default setup is not warranted for a certain feature, we propose to use a replacement component. Everything in Plasma is a replacable component, so it was built with the option to change things fundamentally.
KDE's mention in iguru's blog seems more like a cover-your-ass notice, to prevent his comment section from filling up with people, rightfully, suggesting to have a look at KDE Plasma. Not everything is perfect there, but the behavior he complains about (putting branding before users, advocating "The One True Way" is *not* common in Plasma, and rarely seen overall in KDE.
I think it's unfair to draw parallels between these complaints to the GNOME camp. KDE did have a rough patch to go through, but that wasn't so much by design, it was a result of a necessary architectural change. We've gotten over it, we have a design that allows you to change pretty much everything to your liking, but it took as some time to get there. This transition has been painful to users, but it's not an attitude thing.
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