Cinnamon 2.0 released - mixed feelings [LWN.net]

Cinnamon 2.0 released - mixed feelings

Posted Oct 14, 2013 8:17 UTC (Mon) by marcel.oliver (subscriber, #5441)
In reply to: Cinnamon 2.0 released - mixed feelings by Rehdon
Parent article: Cinnamon 2.0 released

That said, the current situation is exactly what you get when everybody has a "vision" to accomplish, no matter what.

That is more or less what I am lamenting. In this entire game, I believe that Clem and others have done an excellent job and have shown good taste regarding the choices they made. Still, I worry where this is going long-term. With Cinnamon, Gnome Classic, Gnome 3, and Unity there are now four "modern" essentially Gnome-based desktops, in addition to KDE (which is actually quite good, but does not appeal as much to me in their default choices and estetics) and the legacy and more light-weight desktops. Why can't they get together and come up with something which caters at least to the entire spectrum of the old Gnome 2 user base?

The point I want to make is that they seem to be so incredibly close, but move away from each other rather than together. I am looking at particular at Fedora as one of the big players to show some leadership here. However, while they have done a lot of good directed (if sometimes controversial) work on other parts of the stack, it appears that they have deferred responsibility for the desktop entirely to the various upstreams, which at least from the perspective of a Fedora user has set the Linux desktop back by at least four or five years.

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Cinnamon 2.0 released - mixed feelings

Posted Oct 14, 2013 13:42 UTC (Mon) by torquay (guest, #92428) [Link] (2 responses)

while they have done a lot of good directed (if sometimes controversial) work on other parts of the stack, it appears that they have deferred responsibility for the desktop entirely to the various upstreams, which at least from the perspective of a Fedora user has set the Linux desktop back by at least four or five years.

Red Hat employs a very sizeable (if not the largest) chunk of Fedora developers. Red Hat makes money from servers, and Fedora acts as a testing sandbox for various server-focused technologies (ie. Fedora is a perpetual alpha for RHEL). Red Hat doesn't really make money from the desktop, and hence it doesn't care about desktops.

Cinnamon 2.0 released - mixed feelings

Posted Oct 14, 2013 17:13 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Red Hat doesn't really make money from the desktop, and hence it doesn't care about desktops.

They do care about the desktop -- or rather, workstations -- Granted, the license costs of a RHEL instance is a rounding error on the per-seat fees for high-end EDA and CAD software.

Cinnamon 2.0 released - mixed feelings

Posted Oct 14, 2013 17:28 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

That's odd then because not only Fedora is ahead of the game when it comes to new desktop relevant technologies like graphics (even things like Arch play catch up), but offers the one of the best and cleanest desktop experiences out there.

It seems to me much more desktop oriented then server oriented.

Cinnamon 2.0 released - mixed feelings

Posted Oct 14, 2013 17:11 UTC (Mon) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]

You make another good point, but I guess you know the answer already for this question:

"Why can't they get together and come up with something which caters at least to the entire spectrum of the old Gnome 2 user base?"

and you don't like it. Me neither, but again I think Clem is the last one to fault here, because he's always been extremely respectful of the work upstream was doing, explaining his choices on purely technical grounds.

Yeah, big egos are getting in the way of a sane cooperation / competition and it's a pity that we're getting more fragmentation on the desktop instead of *less*. As a user, I'm voting with my feet and with my wallet, and both go towards Cinnamon at the moment.

Rehdon