Re: GNOME now

[Posted November 28, 2012 by corbet]

From:		Alan Cox <alan-AT-lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To:		Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi-AT-gmail.com>
Subject:		Re: GNOME now
Date:		Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:50:32 +0000
Message-ID:		<20121128135032.74c2215b@pyramind.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc:		rms-AT-gnu.org, GNOME Foundation <foundation-list-AT-gnome.org>
Archive‑link:		Article

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:33:26 +0000
Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi@gmail.com> wrote:

> hi;
> 
> On 28 November 2012 11:02, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
> >> What I took from that is that the freedom to modify your computing
> >> environment is only meaningful in the first degree to programmers.
> >
> > And if GNOME continues to bury all the configuration in secret corners
> > without a UI, and even the basic stuff only by an add on (tweak tool)
> > you'll continue to fail to empower users to modify their computing
> > environment.
> 
> yes, because we all know that Freedom means Tweaking configuration
> options, or *having* to modify your environment in order for it to
> work.

Freedom means having the ability to do these things. Enhancing the
freedom of users means giving them the ability to do these things if they
wish.

Nothign to do with having to modify your environment and you know it.

> having options everywhere in your face and in your UI is not
> empowering anyone: let's drop this fallacy.

There is a difference between having options in your face and being able
to find them as a non-technical user.

At the end of the day the market size for "people who agree exactly with
the Gnome defaults" is smaller than "people who kind of like it but want
to tweak a couple of things". Our way or the highway doesn't work very
well with UI. I'm surprised the fact that there's only one distribution
of note still defaulting to Gnome 3  hasn't woken people up a bit more.

Alan

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 6:51 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (2 responses)

No agenda there LWN?

> Our way or the highway

Vroom, vroom.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 10:56 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Yes, I'm enjoying the open road too.

"You road I enter upon and look around! I believe you are not all that is here; I believe that much unseen is also here." -Walt Whitman

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 11:37 UTC (Thu) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link]

There's "agenda" and there's "perspective". LWN makes no pretense of having wikipedia's "Neutral POV"; the editorial perspective is something that I for one appreciate.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 10:00 UTC (Thu) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (5 responses)

I've been watching how my kids (5, 7 and 9) use our computers. They prefer GNOME 2 and have tweaked everything you could imagine. To them it's magic, it gives them power, a sense of accomplishment, and OWNERSHIP. They share tweaks with each other and help each other out.

No one can tell me options and tweaks are bad or hard. The kids figured it out themselves, even the 5 year old. They now argue over who gets the fedora 14 machine, the loser get fedora 17 and GNOME 3.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 10:21 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

Install KDE in one of those machines and tell them Santa's came to town! (I am a [heavily-customized] KDE user :-D)

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 10:32 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

it gives them … OWNERSHIP

Yes. Indeed aren't there well-known, widely-regarded books in HCI (or is it marketing?) which discuss the importance of allowing customisation precisely for this reason - so the user feels the product/device is theirs and develops an attachment to it?

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 11:46 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

I second the above comment. On a netbook with Gnome3, XFCE, LXDE and KDE our son when he was 6 ended up with using KDE. He had been using it without switching to anything else AFAIK for the last 8 months.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Dec 3, 2012 11:55 UTC (Mon) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link]

> To them it's magic, it gives them power, a sense of accomplishment, and OWNERSHIP. They share tweaks with each other and help each other out.

Yep, I remember doing the same thing with my brother when we were growing up. It was a fun activity, and a good way to gradually start to figure out how this stuff all worked.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Dec 3, 2012 12:07 UTC (Mon) by Uraeus (guest, #33755) [Link]

Tried pointing the kids to the GNOME Shell extensions website?
https://extensions.gnome.org/

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 15:11 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (8 responses)

At least two "distributions of note" still default to GNOME 3: Fedora and Debian.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 16:36 UTC (Thu) by pranith (subscriber, #53092) [Link] (4 responses)

Debian defaults to Xfce now

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a...

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 17:47 UTC (Thu) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link] (3 responses)

No it doesn't. You are quoting a commit that has been reverted multiple times and never reached the archive. It's just that some news media outlets picked it up despite there not being any formal announcement of the matter.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 18:11 UTC (Thu) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (2 responses)

You might want to look at this recent commit…

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 18:36 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

This has gone back and forth repeatedly, as the efforts to squeeze GNOME onto CD1 progress.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 29, 2012 20:42 UTC (Thu) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]

Which, again, has not been uploaded. The current version of tasksel is 3.14. I know that this reverting stuff is hard to understand, but it's also highly unlikely that it will be switched to xfce for wheezy (the upcoming Debian stable). It would most likely not get the approval of the release managers unless a CD1 with GNOME3 is not possible size-wise.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Nov 30, 2012 16:37 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

Then Debian is the exception that proves the rule.

Sorry, just trolling. :)

Re: GNOME now

Posted Dec 4, 2012 16:15 UTC (Tue) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link] (1 responses)

debian stable still uses GNOME2. (so does gentoo stable)

Re: GNOME now

Posted Dec 4, 2012 22:46 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

But will Debian stable get GNOME 3 (the DE) as an option before it becomes old-stable? Since the apps aren't parallel installable and it's Debian stable, I would never had expected GNOME 3 to be an option. And from what I've seen, Gentoo stable hovers between Debian's stable and testing paces, so it not appearing there isn't a surprise either. If Gentoo stable is *still* GNOME 2 a few months after Debian stable has GNOME 3, *that's* a statement with some meaning in this thread.

Basically, saying Debian stable still runs version X is like saying CentOS 5 runs version X of some application. If X is sufficiently new, it's not saying much when you're trying to see who the "laggards" are.

Re: GNOME now

Posted Dec 6, 2012 9:53 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

I'm surprised the fact that there's only one distribution of note still defaulting to Gnome 3 hasn't woken people up a bit more.

That one's easy: the GNOME developers are visionaries. Consider the history of Emacs 20: RMS forced MULE, multibyte encodings, on people at a time when most didn't want them. A considerable number of users flocked to XEmacs, which offered a sane 8-bit environment, while developers struggled to fix Emacs and make the multibyte support production-ready.

These days, multibyte support in XEmacs is still optional, and XEmacs is used mainly for "sentimental" reasons (meaning that the user base sees few new users, and a sizeable number of defections from users at intermediate level). One of the most cited reasons is the "mature" support of utf-8 that Emacs has. Of course, utf-8 support from XEmacs is quite better than what Emacs started with. But making multibyte support mandatory at a time that was not really ready for it has given it a solid headstart.

Now that is the same kind of situation that the GNOME 3 developers see themselves in: they think they started on something new that will prevail in the long run, even though it is not necessarily better right now.

It's a theoretic possibility. But I am skeptical. They don't have, as far as I can see, someone of RMS caliber and appeal sticking to his guns, so even if one considered them on the right technical track, the plan could just peter out.