An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

I actually did start putting it up gitorious, although I haven't gotten very far -- getting things to build is kind of a pain in the ass for GNOME. I still for instance can't get gtk-doc to actually work, despite using standard Fedora packages for it, which makes building many core modules a bit difficult. Something with the m4 macros is failing, and I don't have the spare time to dig into it right now.

Also, having gone over a lot of recent GNOME changes in git, it seems that a lot of the core modules really are just moving away from what we want. I can see a few maintainers fighting the good fight (like the gnome-panel maintainer thankfully telling McCann to sit down and shut up when he asks for sweeping removal of any GNOME 2 compatibility... if only everyone would do that) but it seems a losing battle. The mystic hobbyist design guru-wannabe is getting away with too much and getting too much of the code I'd need to build off of to be flat out ripped out of the modules. If they were just configuration changes, I could just repackage GNOME with some patches to the stock configuration as gnome-exde or something; instead, though, I need to flat out fork.

I've actually started reinvestigating XFCE. They have no public docs on design goals or anything, but it does seem like they're trying to clean up a lot of the crufty horrible UI and move more towards what GNOME 2 used to represent. Their primary problem is not a lack of desire towards a good desktop but a lack of manpower.

It may be better to try to get more support for XFCE from the community rather than fracturing it, or trying to fight against disinterested GNOME developers.

I'm going to dig into the XFCE code a bit more tonight or this weekend and see where that goes. There's a few hugely annoying UI warts that I may patch and see how well the XFCE community responds to changes that may remove some old-school UNIX uber-nerd-never-got-laid configuration options (like a text entry for strftime formatting for the clock applet on the panel? and no default entry for what is clearly the most popular and desirable format for most US users? WTF people!?) and gear things towards a better out of the box experience for people who don't know about, care about, or want to care about CDE or UNIX heritage.