The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 2:12 UTC (Thu) by hp (guest, #5220)
In reply to: The GNOME project at 15 by bojan
Parent article: The GNOME project at 15

> If developers cannot come up with a genuine functional improvement as a
> result of a change, they should not be engaging in it.

Nobody changes things just for kicks. Truly.

There isn't some moment where people say "OK, I can't come up with any reason this is an improvement, but I'll do it anyway."

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 2:16 UTC (Thu) by hp (guest, #5220) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe it was my fault for saying "Sometimes, software should not have been changed. It's not better enough."

What I mean is with 20/20 hindsight, in retrospect sometimes it should not have been changed. i.e. people make mistakes.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:47 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

As I said in some other posts, I think Gnome 3 can actually be fixed rather easily. The Cinnamon effort proves this quite neatly (unfortunately, it also creates even more desktop fragmentation).

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 12:40 UTC (Fri) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]

> As I said in some other posts, I think Gnome 3 can actually be fixed
> rather easily. The Cinnamon effort proves this quite neatly
> (unfortunately, it also creates even more desktop fragmentation).

I agree. I tried Cinnamon a while ago and I liked the concept, but I found it still a little rough.

Like Unity, Cinnamon probably had to patch the GNOME libraries or live with APIs designed exclusively for Gnome Shell. In recent times, multiple GNOME developers have advocated for tighter end-to-end integration across the software stack, which sounds like a polite way to say that they won't take patches from other GNOME-based desktops unless they benefit Gnome Shell directly.

The situation for distributors is less than ideal: they're being forced to either carry forked versions of upstream libraries, or ship Gnome Shell only.

(disclaimer: the above is based on what packagers are saying in multiple forums, I haven't looked at the patches in question).