The year of the Linux tablet? [LWN.net]

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:39 UTC (Wed) by robbe (guest, #16131)
In reply to: The year of the Linux tablet? by nzjrs
Parent article: The year of the Linux tablet?

So it does. But if you want Apple, you know where to find it.

I do not get the point of releasing free software that you don't want people to change -- maybe "shared source" a la MS would be a more appropriate license.

That said maybe a better option for GNOME would be to produce a "reference platform" as their complete offering, and ask would-be reviewers to test that. If it is really that great in integration, it will stand on its own.

Reminds me a bit of the spats mplayer upstream had with Debian packaging its software non-optimally. For an extreme case of control-freakery and look at Schily's cdrecord.

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The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 20:32 UTC (Wed) by nzjrs (guest, #35911) [Link]

Be careful conflating "cant change" (apple) and "shouldn't change" (GNOME, not that I agree that is the gnome position, if there is one, BTW)

The former is anti FOSS, the latter seems like good engineering based on limiting the scope of work to maximize the experience based on limited development resources.

Some people (not you actually, your reply was reasonable) have an undeserved sense of entitlement in FOSS, it is not enough that you get the GNOME code and have the freedom to break it to your will, those people require everyone else to do the work and bend it to their will. Not liking the GNOME direction or plans does not make them OMG APPLE EVIL.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 7:40 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (8 responses)

I do not get the point of releasing free software that you don't want people to change -- maybe "shared source" a la MS would be a more appropriate license.

if we didn't really want people to change, contribute, extend and improve our work then I'm pretty sure we'd have chosen another license. or went completely over and used BSD/MIT/X11 instead of LGPLv2.1+.

we want to define what's GNOME more carefully and precisely, so that developers will be able to target that platform without having to care about conflicts within our own software caused by the combinatorial explosion of moving parts. we want to be able to say to a user that any awesome application targeting that platform is going to be as tightly integrated with it as any application we write. we want to be able to have a fully structured approach, from the kernel up to the SDK, so that users won't have to mess around with their distributions.

if that's perceived as "being like Apple" then I'd be proud, as it would mean that we're doing, in the open, something that a multi-billion dollar company does in secret; and, unlike with Apple, if people don't like it they can take full advantage of our license, and go do their own awesome thing without any fear of patents or copyright infringment.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 14:44 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (7 responses)

The issue is that a lot of people want to break stuff with various choices. And the removal of that ability is where the frustration comes from.

To use the analogy of cars.

A 1960's VW bug was the epitomy of the vehicle you could take apart and put together in many ways. Most of those ways would be horrible to look at but it was fun to do so. You learned a LOT from being able to break a car and make it do stuff that wasn't what it was originally designed to do, and you could always mill pieces to rebuild it (which is why there are still so many 1960's VW's on the road, because the parts are easily replaceable).

A 2011 VW bug is the opposite end. It is a very pretty car, and I will say it is fun to drive where it was designed to drive with. It looks a lot like the original, and talks the same talk about being a free love sort of system. But deep inside it is not anything like that. Because it is designed to work and look in a certain way it is very very unfriendly to be changed to look like anything else. It is a pain to mod, and just not fun for that type of person.

The basic message is "You have taken the fun out of modding my system."

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 6:38 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (6 responses)

The basic message is "You have taken the fun out of modding my system."

that's why we didn't base the whole desktop shell on a high level language, and we didn't include the way to inject custom extensions, extensions that would not be able to access the whole of the Gnome API through introspection.

oh, wait...

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 15:06 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (5 responses)

You (GNOME) might have done so, but the messaging is lost. What messaging, I constantly run into is "Making changes to how GNOME is set up by default is a detriment to the GNOME experience and should not be done."

Look at how you messaged your reply to me and realize that tone of snide, sarcastic superiority is how unwelcoming Gnome has become.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 15:15 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

I think we have been picky about responses we choose to consider (invariably negative ones apparently) and discard the really interesting and deeper choices.

It has been obvious from the start the GNOME Shell was designed to be extensible (a whole lot of extensions really, have you done a yum -C search gnome-shell-extension in Fedora 15 lately?) and the recent discussions around setting up a website to make this process easier with no restrictions beyond robustness and security should have been enough messaging but unfortunately lost in the noise. I think, GNOME developers should have been vocal to compensate and they have failed to do so as well. I hope they do better marketing (beyond just gnome3.org).

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 16:02 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

No I haven't done that search, and thank you for pointing it out. I realize that a lot of my own negativity towards starts in the beginning of the day with a

"Gnome 3 Failed to Load... This most likely means your system .. is not capable of delivering the full GNOME 3 experience."

which translate to me as "You aren't rich/good/etc enough to use this."

Which I realize is my own problem due to my self-identifying with the hardware too much. I do see that F16 doesn't remind me of this every day which is a nice change. And I see there are 37 extensions I wasn't aware of before.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 26, 2011 15:46 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

It should not be done, but it's designed to be easy for you to do so if you choose to.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 29, 2011 21:03 UTC (Mon) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (1 responses)

You (GNOME) might have done so, but the messaging is lost. What messaging, I constantly run into is "Making changes to how GNOME is set up by default is a detriment to the GNOME experience and should not be done."

yes, it should not be done. in the same way that modding a car most of the time removes the road-worthiness of the same, and you should be aware of that. should you decide to continue, there are ways in which this not only is possible, but it's also easy to do. you pay the price of stuff potentially breaking, so there's that.

Look at how you messaged your reply to me and realize that tone of snide, sarcastic superiority is how unwelcoming Gnome has become.

wow, sarcasm: now a novelty on LWN and in an open source project. something that never happened before, and it's now unwelcoming.

oh, sorry: I again used sarcasm - targeted at somebody that never really bothered (to his own admission) to check before writing off something that I worked on.

The year of the Linux tablet?

Posted Aug 30, 2011 15:22 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

You are over-reaching on the "never bothered to check". Never bothered would not mean I haven't tried using GNOME3 at all. I changed over my desktop and used it for 3 weeks on Fedora-15 and am using it again for Fedora-16. I have asked around for help and gotten the "Making changes to the desktop, screensaver, etc is not to be done." answers.

My issues were solved by Rahul. The systems I have run in fallback mode so I am not using mutter or seem to have any access to it. Such is life.