GNOME has lost its way [LWN.net]

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 19, 2004 14:00 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (subscriber, #21690) [Link]

You are certainly entitled to your opinions, but I think your particular complaints are ill-founded here. In particular:

You say: "Using a different window manager was an easy change [but is not now]".

It is still easy to change window managers. At the command line, type killall metacity; [type the name of your window manager here];

And you're set. Now GNOME won't work properly with window managers that don't meet the freedesktop specs. Several window managers, including IceWM and KWin will work very well with GNOME.

You also say: "Nautilus is a swiss army knife of a program, designed to do everything possible, but does absolutely nothing very well."

That statement is less and less true. Nautilus originally was designed to be the suiss army knife you describe (much the same way that Konqueror is designed to be the swiss army knife of KDE). Some people want a program with that kind of flexibility. The GNOME developers, on the other hand, have been leaning more toward a make-the-program-do-one-thing-well paradigm. For example, Nautilus no longer functions as a both a file manager and a webbrowser (use a webrowser for that). Nautilus is increasingly tending toward being a light-weight file manager in the MacOs Finder philosophy. Try a recent Nautilus out. It's quite nice.

You also say: "Does anyone else remember GNOME 1.4 with its light weight feel, it's snapier response time than KDE, and its simplicity, abck before nautlius?"

I won't argue that GNOME is no longer as light-weight as it was. I believe all the il8n backend work and accessibility work on GTK added some heft to GNOME (OTOH, those are both necessary in a toolkit these days).

However, I disagree about how GNOME had "simplicity" in the 1.4 days. GNOME 2.x has worked actively to provide a simpler interface. Most complaints involve this trend toward simplicity. So, how was GNOME simpler before?

You also say: "The Gnome developers need to decide if they want to make a dumbed down desktop for the unwashed masses (something I personally feel is beyond their current reach) or if they wish to return to their roots and make a powerful desktop that's easily customizable."

GNOME is still very customizable. You just need to use GConf (either through gconf-editor or the command-line gconf-tool) to make many of these changes. The philosophy is that newbies don't need to make all these changes, so why clutter the interface with the options? Power users, OTOH, should be able to use GConf to find the many, many other preference tweaks because those users are, after all, power users. Maybe, the problem is that there are intermediate power users who want to tweak the desktop but not l33t enough to use the command line or gconf-editor.

If so, someone needs to step up to set up a Tweak-UI desktop programlet to tweak GNOME to your heart's content in a nice GUI interface. If you want it, it's up to you to write it and maintain it. This is free software and comes with some responsibility. If you want a feature, either code/maintain it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.

I hope this helped. Cheers!

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 19, 2004 14:29 UTC (Wed) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

It is still easy to change window managers. At the command line, type killall metacity; [type the name of your window manager here];

In what sense is this an improvement over the days when you could go to the gnome configuration applet and choose from a list of detected, gnome-compatible window managers and push a button to switch?

It's definately inferior in several ways. First, while I'm fine with using command-lines, the whole point of GNOME was, I thought, to bring the power of the system to people that need GUIs, no? To go from the old way to the new one here makes it seem like the goal is rather to take the power away from people that need GUIs. This is a change that *discourages* the average user from excercising their freedom, by making it accessible only via an interface that is relatively obscure to them.

Secondly, of course, with the kill and start method you have to repeat those steps each session. With the old configuration option you could set your preference once and it would be saved for you. Which path here is more productive, and more friendly and respectful of the end-user?

Once again, the change doesn't make sense if you assume the architect who made it actually wants to give the user freedom and power - only if you rather assume the architect, like in the proprietary world, thinks he knows best and the user should be discouraged from making his own choices, if they can't be forbidden entirely. This is a very inappropriate stance for any Free Software project, IMOP.

However, I disagree about how GNOME had "simplicity" in the 1.4 days. GNOME 2.x has worked actively to provide a simpler interface. Most complaints involve this trend toward simplicity. So, how was GNOME simpler before?

It has become in many ways simpler, yes, but what was simpler before and now more complicated and difficult was to customise it to your liking. I remember firing up a fresh installation, starting X with Gnome installed as the default, going to the configuration and with a few clicks telling it I preferred to use WindowMaker instead of the then default which was Sawmill/Sawfish. The screen flickered for a few seconds and I had Gnome running with WindowMaker. When I restarted, it was still Gnome with WindowMaker. When I wanted to experiment with IceWM for a bit, a few clicks made the change, and it stayed changed until I wanted to change it back. When I decided I'd rather not have GMC startup, again there was an easy to find GUI interface to make this wish known, and it was respected - GMC quit loading on startup. It's now far more complicated to get Gnome to accept and honour such wishes, so in that way it's certainly fair to say it was simpler before.

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 19, 2004 16:41 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

First, while I'm fine with using command-lines, the whole point of GNOME was, I thought, to bring the power of the system to people that need GUIs, no? To go from the old way to the new one here makes it seem like the goal is rather to take the power away from people that need GUIs. This is a change that *discourages* the average user from excercising their freedom, by making it accessible only via an interface that is relatively obscure to them.

I think that your complaint is misguided. Providing a GUI option to swap window managers is likely to be either worthless or confusing to a typical newbie. They'll either ignore it because they don't understand what a window manager is and why they'd want to change, or they'll try using it anyway and be befuddled by the way that various aspects of their user experience change in subtle and non-obvious ways. By the time that a user knows enough about X to want to change his window manager, he should also know enough that a simple command line like "killall metacity && sawfish &" shouldn't be a big problem.

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 19, 2004 16:59 UTC (Wed) by uravanbob (subscriber, #4050) [Link]

So you're saying that since I've been using Unix(tm)en since 1983 I should use the command line for everything, most especially things I don't do very often?

The complaint to the GNOME developers is that in their apparent goal to simplify things for newbies, they've critically and unnecessarily broken things that used to work just great for the rest of us. My personal favorite example is the desktop switching - metacity sucks but it isn't worth my time to keep fighting it.

If only Enlightenment 17 would land... :-)

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 19, 2004 20:32 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

The 'rest of us' are a shrinking minority.. people who want to look under the hood are going to be less and less as computers become more comodities.

Most of these complaints sound like my grandfathers complaining that automatics were ruining the car, that you couldnt work on an engine anymore because of all the fuel-saving/air-cleaning crap.. of course my grandfather told me he used to hear the same thing from his grandfather about horse and buggies being replaced by cars.

In the end, we all sound like the loons in the park yelling because the world changed and we didnt.

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 20, 2004 19:11 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]

The target market you define for Gnome is not the folks posting comments here.

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 20, 2004 19:44 UTC (Thu) by raytd (guest, #4823) [Link]

The 'rest of us' are a shrinking minority.. people who want to look under the hood are going to be less and less as computers become more comodities.

I beg to differ. F/OSS will eventually become ubiquitous providing the resources to countless numbers of new developers that wish to 'look under the hood'. I haven't counted lately, but either there are a lot more F/OSS developers or they've all just recently setup project homepages.

I do think that the people like your grandfather (soon to be you and I) either became overwhelmed by the change or became mechanics. (FWIW, I agree with him on the point of automatics.)

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 19, 2004 22:41 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

>Secondly, of course, with the kill and start method you have to repeat >those steps each session.

Not true, your change will be remembered by the session manager, just like all other programs...

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 19, 2004 19:49 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

It is still easy to change window managers. At the command line, type killall metacity; [type the name of your window manager here];

And you're set. Well, not quite. You first have to change the process of metacity so that it doesn't respawn before you start the other window manager. Also, you have remember to use 'nohup' if you start from a command line, or else your window manage is going to die when you close the terminal program.

None of this is easy. In fact, it would be tough to make it much harder for the average user. If it's been documented outside of mailing list archives, I've not seen it. And the situation is worse than it used to be; GNOME 1.x had a window manager option in preferences.

All this because some hypothetical pap-sucking idiot user is going to get confused if he sees a 'window manager' option in preferences. I don't buy it.

GNOME has lost its way

Posted May 27, 2004 9:57 UTC (Thu) by dash2 (guest, #11869) [Link]

All this because some hypothetical pap-sucking idiot user is going to get confused if he sees a 'window manager' option in preferences. I don't buy it.

Most of the people I know - PhD students - do not know what a "window manager" is, nor should they. Seeing a "change window manager" option in preferences would be yet more proof to them that computers are bizarre, obscure devices, existing in a world of meaningless jargon.

If you want to change window manager, learn how to do it. If you want to change window manager from the GUI, patch your system or write a panel applet. Don't complain about the fact that Gnome is trying to make a user-friendly desktop. It's fine to be a tweaker, but not to impose extra complexity on others because you don't want to DIY.