The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:15 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

The following is personal opinion. I disagree with the direction of GNOME, but it's not personally directed at you or others :)

The difference between what one has today, and the "start button" that is having to click "Activities" to do anything is that today, I have launchers all over my desktop, and all kinds of sources of information/interaction I don't have to seek out, and I can customize every aspect of what I do. If I want the weather, there it is (both in C and in F) in weather applets, if I want the time, there it is, where I choose it to be (and certainly not right in the middle of the screen). Today, I can even navigate to useful places simply through a menu at the top of the screen (albeit the default was changed a long time ago to spawn a new nautilus window for everything you can think of doing), of (shock!) right clicking on the desktop.

As to trying something different. This is both commendable to try new things sometimes, and also saddening in this case. What I want to see in the Linux space is standardization, commoditization, consistency, and a platform people can get behind. Not ripping out what finally works well just to replace it with something else that will take years to get roughly back where we started. I would much rather GNOME 2.x had incrementally changed over the next 5-10 years in ways that existing and new users would not find so radically different. Like it or not, there is a way that people interact with graphical interfaces, and there are certain expectations. You can take a person who has never used a computer and teach them almost anything, but the other tens of millions of us have certain expectations and don't enjoy having to completely change the way we interact. If I show some non-Linux friends of mine gnome-shell they're going to find it very pretty, but far less familiar than where they came from, and I don't think we command enough share of the landscape to be doing that. But I might be wrong, and so be it. It's not for me though.

As to the design. Yes, it's great on a *cell phone* or a *netbook*. But as with too many other things in the Linux landscape, it's targeting the wrong thing. With all due respect, we should not forget desktops, workstations, and servers. This is where we came from, and where we still are. Netbooks are shiny, wonderful, distractions, and they're well covered by many competing offerings that already have established bases.

Thanks,

Jon.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:43 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (28 responses)

Sure Jon, I realize that this is not personal. I respect your opinion.

One nitpick, you don't have to click on Activities, it's more of a gesture to the top right corner. So you flick your mouse to the top right and you get the menu. Of course you can click if you want to, or your can use the windows key (or meta key).

Nobody is telling you to give up the launchers. There are plenty of software that does that already. For some reason, launchers are a popular piece of software to write. Nobody is *quite* happy with the default set of launchers and so they come up with their own panel and launcher etc. Sure, we took it away on the default install but you can use awn, docky or whatever and get the same effect. One great thing about GNOME 3 is that we didn't re-write everything.. you can still use the same software from GNOME 2 today. We've deprecated the API but you can still use them. So the wealth of software out there is not outdated.

Regarding standardization, commoditization and consistency. We want that as well. You'll find that as a platform GNOME has that. We are still source compatible with everything in GNOME 2. We took an incremental approach to the developer platform, but separated the user experience portion of it so that we can in fact make changes. There is also nothing stopping someone going out and re-implementing GNOME 2 on top of GNOME 3 libraries. Judging from the number of already existing re-implementations of the GNOME panel, I'd see it within months. So honestly, you're not losing anything.

You might be wrong, GNOME might be right.. how would we know if we don't shake things up? Note that we've been consistent for 14 years in terms of same interaction sans distracting options. XFCE, KDE, also have the same interface doing the exact same things, only the plumbing is different. We haven't changed that user interface since then neither have they. Don't think after 14 years it might be time to make changes? There is a balance between being static and evolving. The game board is the same, all we're doing is moving the pieces around. As a project who wants to push the limits you're giving us a bleak reality of doing nothing but moving game pieces.

Look, I come from a background similar to yours I suspect. I had defined launchers, gizmos all over my panel etc etc. I still cry that I don't have libgtop applet on my panel. But I found that when I gave them up, I realized I didn't really need them. The reason I wanted them was that system below me was unstable or didn't have the kind of defaults that I wanted. Even if I had whizzy stuff, I quickly got bored because they were gimmicks. It might also be a function of age. I'm less impressed with gizmos than when I was in my twenties. Now there are somethings I can't ignore and for that an option is or gconf setting is required. You're a power user, you're not scared to change those things I reckon.

We don't need a DE for a workstation or servers? All we have as a consumer desktop environment is netbooks, desktops, embedded devices, and cell phones and we want to be on all of them. We want to be able to come up with a user interface that works for all of them.

Thanks for an engaging discussion..

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:20 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (19 responses)

Glad we're keeping it nice and civil :)

On the Activities, I understand gestures also work, and I'm sure they'll figure out some additions (plus there are other ways to script the UI, I know this, and I suppose I could hack up some things if I wanted, etc.), but today I have launchers on my top panel for e.g. firefox. Loading a new browser or browser window is easy, with only one click and less distance :)

The thing with a lack of launchers and the like is it's part of the overall trend to remove these features (and other configuration, and hide it behind what /appears/ to me to be very similar to a Microsoft-style registry - so now the options are still there but you have to fire up d/gconf editors to set them...and I can see "power" "Linux" users in a few years trading all kinds of obscure keys on forums). Many of us don't want these features removed. We want them to work out of the box, we want launchers. Frankly, I see very little wrong with the GNOME 2.x implementation for my uses. I could of course use the old 2.x bits but we both know that they're not going to be developed, so I am concerned about doing that while other things are moving (and possibly breaking stuff). That also only delays the inevitable. I become a "legacy" user who knows the end is neigh but is trying to drag it out...not a good situation.

I appreciate that the underlying bits of GNOME are good. I've been fond of many of the plumbing pieces over the past few years, the hotplug, power management, great integration, GNOME VFS, etc. That all works well. It's the coating on top that is unfortunate. If a group go and basically do a GNOME 2.x that can be supported, I'll probably switch over to it, since I would like to retain the ability to use my media keys, automount, etc.

I'm not sure shaking things up was entirely necessary in GNOME, but I understand your point. I'm not part of the GNOME project anyway, so it's not up to me. I'm just a user of it. But I do think there is a trend right now to be trendy and redesign things for the sake of it, or re-implement stuff for the sake of it. Not just the User Interface, but lots of other pieces that don't need to be redone. In my opinion, what this does for users is confuse them, and cause them to have to re-learn everything they are used to. I see this as being another reason users will look to other platforms. If I'm going to have to adapt my entire desktop, why not just install Chrome OS or something else? Why stick with GNOME at all? If there's going to be a complete change, it needs to re-convince existing users *and* be compelling for new users at the same time.

We perhaps do come from similar backgrounds. See, I used to enjoy compiling up early builds of enlightenment or whatever, and I've played with jhbuild/etc. on occasion too. My first Linux install took 3 weeks of carrying hundreds of floppy disks miles from the one place I had net access to home, rinsing and repeating when disks failed, etc. But these days, I just want a computer that works, with a UI that is consistent and I am familiar with. I want to take it for granted that this is a solved problem and move forward. When there's a cool new addition, like having the ability to list lots of times and timezones in the clock, I don't want that to disappear in the next version, and so forth.

The recent trend to re-implement everything in the Linux space has, sadly, seen me increasingly use a Mac on weekends for personal stuff. It's not that I want to do so, it's that it's a desktop environment that remains consistent. As I also leave my 20s, I also don't really care about rebuilding my desktop, tweaking configs, or joining some web forum and sharing all of the wonderful 3D hardware details, and many of the other things you allude to :) I'd rather spend my weekend learning about quantum mechanics (that was last weekend, trying to understand transistors, which interest me far more than spending my weekend re-installing Xfce when I've done similar for over 15 years). But at the same time, I still want my computer to display the weather on the panel. My GNOME 2.x desktop does this, my Mac does this, in gnome-shell I'm left thinking it's been deemed "too distracting" to know the weather outside so I should have no interest in having it displayed :)

On the power user front, I would hope I'm just a demanding user. I'm not someone who ever really cares about changing GTK themes, and about the most I usually do is set the wallpaper on a fresh install. I used to think of power users as those people who spent weeks needlessly configuring their systems and then creating long "signatures" on forums to share just how wonderful their 3D gaming performance was (I so don't care about gaming, or 3D beyond the academic interest of how it works). So, if I'm a power user, that doesn't bode well for the number of others who will need to learn to tweak random dconf settings over the coming months and years.

Not sure about your final comment - did you mean we don't need a workstation/server GUI or we do? I personally see a trend toward (and I don't mean this offensively) "dumbing down" the overall experience, which I don't think helps our core strength as a workstation/server platform.

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:26 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (18 responses)

Of course! Being rude would accomplish nothing other than make things worse. Besides, as I said you guys are all being nice to me so I'm happy to discuss these things.

OK - so I think we're coming down to some of the core issues here. I'm pretty sure what you've written down is shared by a lot of people.

Regaridng GConf (or DConf) - that was given a bad rap and we didn't engage with anybody to fully explain that bit. Let's put it this way, if you wanted a persistent key value store that would allow apps to react when the values change, how would you do it? In this case, having a name space, and then a simple key/value with a set of types is really all GConf is and a server to maintain state. It's NOTHING like the windows registry. I think in DConf they've tightened things up a bit in terms of namespace. It is the name space portion that could be abused. GConf was damned by it's superficial likeness to the windows registry. You will note that nobody is talking about GConf in forums all that often. I think someone just writes some kind of gui tweak tool to do all that stuff. Looks at the gconf today with gconf-editor, can you claim it is a mess as the windows registry is? We've had it for ten years now.

For all the negatives that came out of the 1.x to 2.x migration it wasn't so bad.. and we were cutting options left, right and center in those days. Today, a lot of you appreciated.. some of you claimed it is perfect. :-)

You might also consider that our drive for "Just works" has improved the linux eco system tremendously with hal, udev, improved x drivers, wayland... there wouldn't be any drive for those projects without a project like ours demanding those features.

As for trendy, people are redesigning UI because there are new devices out there. Tablets, smart phones, medical devices, gps stuff.. everything is all getting connected to the Internet.. so projects like firefox, chrome are all out there trying to capture those markets. New types of embedded devices are coming out. We are winning there. Linux is _the_ embedded OS of choice. It is my blu-ray player, my television.. and it continues. It's trendy because there is a trend. :-) If we want free software to make inroads on these devices then we're going to need projects like GNOME, Meego, KDE to be able to adapt and be able to get into those areas. So we need to re-envision what the user interactions would be, and we need to push the rest of the Linux eco system to support it. Technology doesn't stay still it marches on, baby.

Users will be willing to lean a new interface if a user gets something out of it. GNOME 2 isn't going away immediately, there will be a transition state where users will be able to get their feet wet and their pace. In the mean time, users will go to KDE4, XFCE, FVWM2 and in that time GNOME will continue to enhance and polish itself. People by that time might come back see that GNOME has something to offer that would give them a reason to learn the new interface. It's on us to meet the challenge entrancing you back to our platform. If we fail.. well we failed, but it isn't for lack of trying. But I'll tell you this, I spent two weeks dogfooding GNOME 3 and I can't go back to GNOME 2. It surprised me because there was a lot of things I loved about GNOME 2, specifically my beloved gtop applet.

I installed NetBSD on my Amiga.. (when I wasn't running AT&T SysV on my Amiga) I've been doing some kind of building and testing for the past 14 years. I would spend hours tweaking my .fvwmrc2 file juuuuust right. Then change it again next week.

What you want and what GNOME envisioned 10 years ago (before it was cool to think having a consistent user interface with minimal tweaking ) and here we are. Maybe you don't want to change, but in order to continue to be relevant we have to.

Skip the first release, come back for 3.2, by then we should have a couple of new extensions, fixed a lot of bugs, and changed UIs around to accommodate the feedback we had in the first iteration. I'm saying all this in order to leave the door open so that those of you disappointed in the changes might relent and come back after we've added some features, or put back features whatever you prefer.

I will note that we didn't re-implement anything but the user experience. But our development platform is exactly the same for the most part. In contrast, KDE4 completely re-did their internal plumbing and maybe it required it. But for those with large projects re-implementing their application was probably a pain they would like to fore go. It took the GNUCash guys 7-8 years to port to GTK2. Very painful. We have too many people depending on our codebase to be doing anything like that again.

Don't get too comfortable with that Mac, the next iteration will use IOS. :-) Which of course follows the same trend we are!

From all you've described, you seem the prime kind of person we want as a user for GNOME 3. If we offered you a stable UI and you got used to the interface and added your launchers, (and fonts for you Jonathan Corbet) I don't see why you couldn't stick with GNOME. :-)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:45 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (15 responses)

On the d/gconf front, I understand why it's not "just text files" (though these days we have all kinds of file monitoring and watching APIs that are getting a lot better for just using text files) but I am very uncomfortable with the idea of hiding the real guts such that one needs to edit these settings directly. If they really were just out of the way, and had a nice UI for changing them, ok. But it really does seem like things are heading into the Microsoft realm of "kinda sorta works" out of the box, with all kinds of obscure knobs you can only tweak if you look up the right schema.

I wasn't a huge fan of the 1.0->2.0 migration either, but it didn't churn my stomach as much as this transition has. I'll agree that having shiny things has advanced the Linux ecosystem (side note: I'm one of those "you can tear my real X server out of my cold dead hands" types when it comes to replacing it with something that is theoretically better but loses the UNIX networking heritage), and that some of these advances were necessary. But I think many of them would have happened anyway. Take automounting, hotplug, whatever, these are all things people like to have working and pretty much independently of the desktop environment they are using.

On the UI trendiness, you didn't really answer my point about retaining relevance to existing platforms :) I'm all for having a tablet or smartphone UI, but in my personal opinion it's simply inappropriate trying to run the same interface on both classes of device. Many others have learned that this is the case through bitter experience and failure in the marketplace, and I think GNOME 3 is going to try to offer what many other projects are already doing (tablet/embedded UIs) while not really catering to those of us who want a traditional desktop. As others said, 2.x is stable and mature. At that point, why not just sustain it, and have those interested in gnome-shell like UIs go and work on a dedicated tablet/embedded UI instead? That surely would have been better IMO.

Why does GNOME have to change to be "relevant"? Others have asked this elsewhere in these comments. This is a *fundamental* issue, and one where I think we very likely strongly disagree. I consider the current GNOME 2.x to be pretty "perfect" as a daily use system. It has some warts, there are things I would change, but I've been logged in for 100 days in this current session and aside from gvfsd doing its usual not understanding network routes changing and needing a kick, everything has been fine. It sounds to me like "relevance" is code for needing to have something for people to work on, or an answer for new kinds of devices. These are worthy goals, but they could (IMO) be better served as sub-projects, optional UIs, and the like, while retaining a great experience that works well. After 10 years, we can finally say Linux has a compelling and great UI, and now is not the time to be completely replacing it with something else :)

I *was* the prime kind of person for GNOME. But "new GNOME" is like "new Coke" to me. It looks great, passes all the tests, but the real proof will be when it's released next month and many times as many users start to have the same kind of reaction we're talking about here.

Thanks,

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 2:12 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (12 responses)

Hi Jon,

The whole GNOME ui everywhere on all devices is my own perception and doesn't reflect what GNOME itself is trying to do. They might just simply focus on the desktop experience. I think big. It's a bad habit. :-)

The separation of the UI from the desktop API itself is a feature, that means we can come up with our own UI for any particular device. What's important is the underlying layers of GTK+/Cairo/Linux as the platform. Separating the UI and allowing us to use javascript to create and control the UI experience gives us the flexibilty of being able to create other UI for other devices.

As for your question why is change relevant. Change is always relevant. Why do you need so many different kinds of filesystems? Isn't ext4 good enough? If we just accept status quo how does anything get done? Why do we need a car? Isn't a horse and buggy good enough? Every time you move to the next level you move to a different set of realities that give you new avenues to pursue. It's in our nature to always pursue what somebody will always consider "flights of fancy". But it is the engine that moves us forward.

All people crave change, but not all crave change in the same area. Desktop people want to push the limits of user interaction. We have no other purpose. No desktop project is going to accept status quo for long. No kernel developer is going to accept using the same scheduler for long. There is always some new hardware that drives making a better scheduler to take advantage of it.

Maybe we've lost you for now.. but guaranteed, those other projects are doing the same thing we are. Maybe some want to give you even greater control of your desktop, give you lots of options, others might want to take away some, put others.. we fiddle with things, that what we do. You fiddle in the areas you're interested in.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 11:41 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (7 responses)

All people crave change

Here's where you should start rethinking. Most people crave stability and dislike change. They may not loathe it, but they don't like it. Change for the sake of change is a bad thing.

(Look at the core Unix tools: fundamentally unchanged other than new features and the removal of restrictions since the 1970s, even though they are definitely not perfect. Why? Inertia. People dislike change.)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:23 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (4 responses)

That's not the reason that GNOME 3 was launched. You can read what the reasons were here: https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/DesignHistory

* Finding windows was frustrating and difficult
* Workspaces were useful but not easy or natural to use
* Launching applications was labour-intensive and error-prone
* The panel suffered from over-configurability; applets were little used by most users

In short, we saw real problems which needed real solutions.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:25 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

It sounds like the amount of mouse movement involved now has made at least two and possibly three of these cases *worse* than they were. (I wouldn't know: I'm a KDE and fvwm2 man. I used to be a GNOMEr but the loss of funtionality in the early GNOME 2 days turned me off for good. Software that won't change to act as I want it, rather than vice versa, gets dumped at once.)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:27 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (2 responses)

> I wouldn't know

Then stop commenting?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:44 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

My apologies for daring to point out how I as a human being use the machine, and why GNOME 3 would apparently not suffice. If ex-users are considered to be lost causes, so be it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 24, 2011 14:16 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>Then stop commenting?

You have yet to make a single comment on this article that isn't outright trolling, but you seem to feel compelled to randomly pop up in every subthread to hurl some abuse.

Commenters like yourself are the reason that I consider LWN to be a largely hostile, poisonous community, and consequently make less of an attempt than I should to behave in a way that I might in a forum I respect.

The one potential positive outcome of your posting is that I resolve to try harder to act as if LWN is more like the place I want it to be, on the grounds that if everyone did that, perhaps it would be.

If only it were possible to killfile entire categories of articles as flamebait, the overall experience would probably be much improved.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:38 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (1 responses)

Exactly!

We have (weirdly) in recent times gotten to a place where there is a big push (I don't mean to single out GNOME here, because it's general) to undermine our UNIX heritage, and throw it all away in the name of shininess. Now, that push may not be malicious, and I'm sure everyone is well intentioned, but the newer generation aren't necessarily respecting what came before, or the value of long-term, stable, backward compatibility.

Why do Microsoft have a strangle hold? Sure, lots of reasons that are not entirely kosher, but they also have win32 (and later stuff) that people have been able to target for about a billion years in writing to a standard platform. It is *high time* we re-embraced our POSIX, SUS, LSB, and other standard routes, had *one* well supported, ingrained and established GUI platform, and could be that shining Linux alternative. It might not be perfect, but by not re-inventing the wheel every 5 years we will finally give others a chance to really target our platform, then we can improve it slowly, evolving as dictated by real world use.

This is what I was alluding at in my other comment(s). I used to care about building up random platform bits for the sake of it, but after 15 years I'm growing tired of the same old stuff. I want a computer that just works and I can take for granted the platform bit. There's been enough time. Sure, I no longer have to run isapnpdump or APS Magicfilter, but in the last few years I've had to fiddle with (not mentioning names) let's just say "way too many" wheel re-inventions of core Linux technologies. All of these are interesting projects, but I would rather we had stuck with what we had before and new problems had been solved instead of doing the same old thing that was being done 10, 15, or 30 years ago.

In a few years, the current generation of folks trying to change everything will be 5 or 10 years older, get to the same realization, and the entire story will repeat itself. I suppose the important thing is not to get too worked up about it, which is why I also run a Mac now (not because I think it's any better, but because it's "good enough" for surfing the web and doing desktop non-server stuff at home). I might have just chuckled to myself and ignored this story, but it did work me up slightly because of the amount of time I've had to waste especially last weekend undoing all of these changes to get back to where I was.

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:43 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

I may also need to get a rocking chair, and a porch and start muttering, I'll accept that :)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:53 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

All people crave change

Really? Could you back up that assertion with a little bit of evidence? My (admittedly anecdotal) experience is that most people hate change when it comes to major changes to the way their computer works. This is based on observations of my kids, parents, siblings and co-workers.

My kids use KDE and found the KDE 4 transition extremely jarring; it took them a couple of weeks to get back to their normal level of productivity.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:34 UTC (Wed) by dmadsen (guest, #14859) [Link] (2 responses)

There's a difference between forcing change and enabling change. Using filesystems as an example as you did is very apropos -- if I want to use an old existing filesystem type, I can, and there are tools to help me migrate when/if I want to.

The changes happen *at my pace and my option*, not anyone else's.

I'm an old fossil. I don't want change. I want my hands/fingers to know what to do on my desktop so that I am free to think about the actual task I'm trying to accomplish. A changing desktop is a distraction, an annoyance, a hindrance to productivity.

And when I have a few minutes and want to try out a specific new feature, I should easily be able to. And if I like it, then I'll use it. Someday maybe I'll use the entire feature set. Whoo-hoo!

Someone may love desktops and it may be their whole life. But it's a tool for me. Don't ever confuse yourself with your user base. And God forbid, don't think that everyone likes Macs or weird cellphone menus or adding lots of mileage on their mouse.

So sure, add all the new stuff you want; rewrite anything you want; have a great time. But when you do it, *don't* mess with what I have!

---dcm

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:46 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link] (1 responses)

I doubt anyone but you can change what you have.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 21:39 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Indeed - but pinning your DE at the previous major version, which is what's necessary to keep it around when you find the new major version utterly unacceptable - tends to make your package manager very, very unhappy very, very quickly.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 2:20 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (1 responses)

> On the d/gconf front, I understand why it's not "just text files" (though these days we have all kinds of file monitoring and watching APIs that are getting a lot better for just using text files)

Except that KDE's kconfig has done exactly that for something like 10 years now: configs stored as plain text ".ini" files, and an efficient binary cache that is regenerated if you change the config files. It seemed to work fine for them...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:14 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> Except that KDE's kconfig has done exactly that for something like 10 years now: configs stored as plain text ".ini" files, and an efficient binary cache that is regenerated if you change the config files. It seemed to work fine for them...

I seem to recall that one of the dconf selling points was that the storage backend was pluggable. Perhaps someone could write a backend that does the same thing as KDE, or even uses kconfig...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 24, 2011 14:04 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>In this case, having a name space, and then a simple key/value with a set of types is really all GConf is and a server to maintain state. It's NOTHING like the windows registry.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? That seems like an accurate description of the Windows registry so I don't get why you believe it's nothing like it.

I think what people hate about the registry is the hiding of options behind an arcane interface, the proliferation of entries with no idea of what they do, the non-textual storage mechanism, and the fact that random applications add new entries and often don't bother to remove them. However almost anything conceivably changeable is documented by Microsoft, typically at least as well if not better than most GConf keys, and all of the other problems still seem to apply to GConf, except perhaps the last, so what makes GConf so different?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 8, 2011 7:40 UTC (Fri) by tjavailable (guest, #74182) [Link]

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:41 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (4 responses)

> We don't need a DE for a workstation or servers? All we have as a consumer
> desktop environment is netbooks, desktops, embedded devices, and cell
> phones and we want to be on all of them. We want to be able to come up
> with a user interface that works for all of them.

Cell phones and tablet computers need a fundamentally different interface than desktop PCs. You cannot create a single interface that works for all of them. Many have tried and failed, including Microsoft.

Embedded devices usually don't have an interface at all. If they do, it will depend heavily on what the embedded device is designed to do. Web interface are popular choices for consumer devices like Wifi routers; command-line interfaces are popular for business-oriented ones like Cisco routers. In any case, there is no room for Gnome here.

In my opinion, desktop environments should stick to what they do best: being boring, predictable and usable on desktop PCs. Being forced to learn new ways to do the same old things is bad. Change for the sake of change is bad.

I respect the GNOME devs for being willing to try out new things. However, maybe they need to explore more alternatives and get feedback from a statistically significant sample of users before really deciding what GNOME 3 will be.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 4:14 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm not arguing for a "One Ring" solution here. I'm saying that we've setup our technology such that we can do that. You do want to show hardware manufacturer that linux + gnome is an all encompassing solution. You can have your embedded device and a great UI to go with it that you could change to your needs. It doesn't have to conform to the desktop style OS, it can be changed to suit your needs.

You're still thinking too technical here... wifi routers, cisco routers, etc. But in any case, we can in fact create a GTK+ interface using a web browser so absolutely you can create a GTK+ app using broadway technnology, See Alex Larsson's post: http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-...

Alex Graveley did something similar a couple of years ago. So yes, there is room for GNOME there. How about medical devices? How about smart phones? How about a device that controls a multi media experience in your living room? How about a universal remote? How about a car stereo? How about the device that controls your house temperature? What about your TV? DVD player? You know your TV and DVD player all run Linux right? Imagine the devices that you interact with every day.

There might be some over-reach and that's fine. We pull back a bit, and then try to push some more. GNOME 3 is kinda boring right? It doesn't have a lot of visual options to change, the desktop is pretty blank except forthat top bar, it is a very unassuming desktop. But there is an extensions setup that you could do interesting things. It doesn't expose a lot of the API yet, but I can see them exposing more and more of the underpinnings.

We need to think big, dream big. If we didn't, it only leads to stagnation and for whatever parts of your life that interest you, you don't want that.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:16 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link] (2 responses)

This point should be repeated. The GNOME developers designed Gnome Shell so that it could be *easily extendable*, much like Firefox, through extensions written in javascript. (The developers are still finalizing the extension mechanism and the documentation about extensions. Most of that will probably land before Gnome 3.2. There are a few extensions already out in the wild, though.) So, the Gnome guys actually designed the shell to invite people to play with the desktop and change the way it behaves to suit the users' needs. They want Gnome Shell to be a power user's playground as well as a place suitable for newbies.

This may not be so apparent right now because the Gnome guys are trying to get the shell out the door in its default mode. After that's done, based on the feedback they receive, the developers will add options, change other options, alter some defaults, and create extensions. They will also invite the users to create lots of extensions. The developers have to get the shell out the door first, however. So, be patient. You may find that soon Gnome Shell will do anything you want it too.

Extensions and applications

Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:02 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

The GNOME developers designed Gnome Shell so that it could be *easily extendable*, much like Firefox, through extensions written in javascript. (The developers are still finalizing the extension mechanism and the documentation about extensions. Most of that will probably land before Gnome 3.2. There are a few extensions already out in the wild, though.) So, the Gnome guys actually designed the shell to invite people to play with the desktop and change the way it behaves to suit the users' needs. They want Gnome Shell to be a power user's playground as well as a place suitable for newbies.

This sounds a lot like what KDE 4 does with Plasma, although I may not be completely up-to-date with the terminology and whether it's specifically a particular flavour of Plasma or not which manages this. Generally, I find the "people who aren't real developers can tinker with JavaScript" attitude somewhat condescending, even if it is possible to make some serious extensions in these environments, but maybe the attitude towards languages other than C and C++ (and the about-face in adopting the awful JavaScript as a concession to "everyone else") is traditionally more of a problem within KDE than GNOME.

I have to say that the applications are what make KDE 3 interesting for me, although the theming obviously plays a role in making everything look largely consistent, and the desktop furniture plays its part by doing what one asks of it in a non-annoying way. Some applications are based on KDE frameworks which would suggest that those frameworks help developers to build decent software, so maybe the real test of a desktop environment should be whether it manages to cultivate applications one would want to use, not whether the designers thought up some radical paradigm that gets in the way of getting to those applications.

Extensions and applications

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:37 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]

> Generally, I find the "people who aren't real developers can tinker with
> JavaScript" attitude somewhat condescending, even if it is possible to
> make some serious extensions in these environments, but maybe the attitude
> towards languages other than C and C++ (and the about-face in adopting the
> awful JavaScript as a concession to "everyone else") is traditionally more
> of a problem within KDE than GNOME.

That's not correct. The motivation for choosing JS was three-fold: rapid prototyping, maturity/speed of the JS engines in Firefox/Webkit, and the massive pool of "web developers" out there who are already familiar with it. It has nothing to do with level of skill. If anything, JS can be harder to develop in because of some missing safety features.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:58 UTC (Wed) by rathann (subscriber, #50815) [Link] (2 responses)

> We are still source compatible with everything in GNOME 2.

Now that either means something else than I think or is a lie. There are many GNOME 2 applications that no longer compile because you renamed libraries (for example, gnome-media to libgnomemediawhateveristhenewname) and changed APIs and ABIs.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:21 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link] (1 responses)

Gnome 2 applications still compile against the GTK+ 2 et al. libraries, which aren't going anywhere. So, Gnome 2 applications will work just fine in Gnome 3.0/Gnome Shell.

GTK+ 3 breaks API and ABI, of course. The break isn't too dramatic, though, and there are porting guides at the Gnome sites. It should be much easier (and quicker) to port from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 than it was from GTK+ 1 to GTK+ 2.

I hope that answers your question.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

Thank you for the clarification.

I think his question was if Gnome 3 really was "source code compatible" with Gnome 2. It sounded a lot like you were saying it was. He was rightly pointing out that this is not correct.

I had the wrong impression until he called you out.