Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps [LWN.net]

Michael Catanzaro lays down the rules for which GNOME applications distributions should package if they want to claim to provide a "pure GNOME experience." "Selecting the right set of default applications is critical to achieving a quality user experience. Installing redundant or overly technical applications by default can leave users confused and frustrated with the distribution. Historically, distributions have selected wildly different sets of default applications. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it’s clear that some distributions have done a much better job of this than others."

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Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 16:45 UTC (Wed) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link] (30 responses)

I'm not sure of the point of having a "pure Gnome experience". If you want that, just go ahead and make an OS out of it, and be done. I mean, the guy speaks dismissively of including Firefox ("It’s OK to include a few third-party, non-GNOME applications by default, but they should be kept to a reasonable minimum.") rather than "Web (Epiphany)". The average user needs at *least* Firefox and Chrome, to cope with those sites that like one and not the other.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 17:18 UTC (Wed) by cwillu (guest, #67268) [Link] (26 responses)

I can't remember the last time I came across a site that worked in one but not the other.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 17:39 UTC (Wed) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (13 responses)

We shouldn't include redundant applications by default, nor expect users to have any clue what a web browser is. (Seriously, ask a random person if they know what Firefox is. "Is that the Internet?") Having two is too much. We have a GNOME browser; if you don't like it, then remove it, but in a default install, Firefox and Chrome are both redundant.

I have neither Firefox nor Chromium installed on my computer. I've used GNOME Web (Epiphany) almost exclusively for four years with minimal trouble. I also maintain it, so I'm biased.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 23:04 UTC (Wed) by steveriley (guest, #83540) [Link] (2 responses)

> ask a random person if they know what Firefox is

For that matter, how many random people will know what GNOME or Linux is? I'm not convinced that "random people" use anything other than Windows. I think we should accept that people who use Linux are a self-selecting group and won't have any difficulty managing multiple web browsers.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 2:39 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

That sounds a bit defeatist. If GNOME resigns itself to supporting a self-selecting group, we will never have the year of Linux on the desktop!

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 29, 2016 9:08 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

The self-selecting group are also your beachhead to the wider world.

E.g., my parents were using GNOME for a while because of me - easiest for me to support. However, the added degree of UI churn that arrived with 3 led to them going to Windows (amongst other reasons). Whatever other obstacles there are to Linux on the desktop, continually re-doing interfaces, and moving stuff around even in small updates, does not help to make Linux useable for non-technical users - especially older ones.

But hey, I must just be a hater.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 9:07 UTC (Thu) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link] (8 responses)

Did you ask a random person whether they'd rather have a VM Manager (core) or something to play MP3s / interface with their iPod/Phone Music App (no functionality in core)?

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 12:27 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (7 responses)

I can guess the answer. Help improving GNOME Music to handle such things would be much appreciated!

(Although I've heard this may not be possible with the newest iPhones, but I'm not sure if that's right or not.)

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 23, 2016 9:40 UTC (Fri) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (6 responses)

Why improve GNOME Music when there's already a perfectly acceptable GNOME modern audio player?

https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop-web/

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 23, 2016 13:48 UTC (Fri) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (1 responses)

It looks really good! My TL;DR answer is: "maybe, could be, with conditions."

I don't know why the Lollypop developers decided to make a third-party app instead of working with GNOME, but I don't think they ever told us about it, so it was never even considered. I heard of it once before on Google+, but I think most GNOME folks don't even know it exists.

To become a core app it would need to be hosted on git.gnome.org (we can't ship stuff from random places outside our control!), make tarball releases on GNOME infrastructure, follow the GNOME release cycle, and present itself as Music in its desktop and appdata files. Maybe the Lollypop developers would be OK with all that, maybe not, I don't know. But it would also require discussion between the Lollypop developers and the Music developers and designers to agree on this path forward, since the GNOME community has been working on Music for years now. I have no clue how that discussion would go. I would be open-minded about it myself if proposed, because I see Lollypop's development activity is much higher. The right place for this discussion would be desktop-devel-list@gnome.org and the proposal should come from a Lollypop developer.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 25, 2016 18:56 UTC (Sun) by lollypop (guest, #111373) [Link]

Hello, here lollypop dev.

I started working on Lollypop for two reason:
- have an advanced version of Gnome Music
- havin fun coding with GTK (I was a KDE dev in my past life)

Today, Lollypop is a quite cool software but I do not want it to be by default in GNOME for many reasons:
- Do not want to slow down dev following GNOME release
- Too many options in Lollypop to be a default player, Gnome Music is simple and is cool as a default player. Advanced users know how to install another application.

And Gnome devs know about Lollypop:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2015-January...

This commit is based on Lollypop code ;)

lollypop

Posted Sep 23, 2016 22:36 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

So I was curious about this...went ahead and installed it on my Tumbleweed system. It put up a notification saying that it was updating its idea of my music and went unresponsive, except when I told it to play an Internet radio station and it crashed. On restart, I left it to its own devices; after a couple of hours it had driven the system into an unrecoverable thrashing fit.

I do believe I'll uninstall this thing.

lollypop

Posted Sep 24, 2016 0:12 UTC (Sat) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

Thanks for the warning!

lollypop

Posted Sep 25, 2016 18:44 UTC (Sun) by lollypop (guest, #111373) [Link] (1 responses)

Just send an issue on github instead of **** on the web

lollypop

Posted Sep 25, 2016 23:12 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Wow... that's one way to make people remember your app forever.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 29, 2016 20:05 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Come on.. most random, non-technical, people I meet know what a web browser is. You can't make people out to be that clueless, just to make a point.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 18:05 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> I can't remember the last time I came across a site that worked in one but not the other.

The bill pay page of the electrical co-op that services my rural property doesn't work with Firefox. I have to switch to Chromium (or likely any webkit-based browser) for it to work.

Also, my county's property appraisal site's parcel search function doesn't work unless I use IE, due to some form of broken javascript that I can't be bothered to debug. (The other search stuff works okay, oddly enough..)

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 2:40 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Did you manage to debug why? Or file bug reports on those browsers?

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 19:16 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

I encounter sites regularly that don't work with one browser or other (as modified by plug-ins and extensions). Some sites that my employer outsources core administrative functions to, for example, work only on google-chrome, but not on Chromium or Firefox. The Chase Bank site doesn't work on my Firefox.

It has been some years since last I tried Epiphany. Does Ad Nauseum (the current favored ad blocker) work with it?

More to the point, why in the world would anyone want a "pure Gnome experience"? It seems incompatible with my marriage, at best, and maybe with one's religion or branch of military service. The concept nauseates.

(We used to hear about "pure-object-oriented" languages, thankfully not lately. I think Java was the last of those. Nobody uses it outside corporate codemills. Is it still even "pure"?)

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 3:16 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

Epiphany has a built-in adblocker enabled by default!

You don't want a pure GNOME experience. Other people do. Many of those people want to use distros that ship GNOME the way GNOME wants to be shipped. These guidelines are for those distros and those people. Don't bother with them yourself; you know what software you want on your computer way better than some irrelevant guidelines could ever guess.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 10:50 UTC (Thu) by keeperofdakeys (guest, #82635) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm quite interested about why a site would work on Google Chrome, but not Chromium. If they are the same release, they are essentially identical besides branding.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 12:50 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

The problem is there are a bajillion build options that your distro may or may not enable when building Chromium, which will be different than what Google uses when it builds Chrome, because there are so many of them. And many of the flags that Google uses are different from the default values in Chromium. They have a flag you need to pass to enable the Hangouts extension, which I believe Ubuntu doesn't use; the only effect of not enabling that flag is that Google Hangouts doesn't work. There are multiple flags for the proprietary EME crap; I bet those are needed for Netflixing. I think WebRTC might still be disabled by default in Chromium (not sure). Most of the multimedia codecs are stripped out of the Fedora Chromium package for legal reasons, so if you care about that you need Chrome.

Chrome has the goodies.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 19:22 UTC (Wed) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link] (5 responses)

IMDB video trailer does not work for me in firefox (linux) for any movie. Sound is working video is not. Example Allied (2016) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3640424/ It works in chrome though.

My wife's bank is doing something funny (working correctly is not included in the funny classification) when I am trying to copy paste the huge secure credentials they forced me to have. Some browsers are better than others but I don't remember which.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 22:02 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

The linked trailer works fine for me in firefox (Debian/testing).

The last time I had problems with a site w/FF was several years ago, and I tried Chromium, and got exactly the same results. (That's also the last time I ran Chromium for anything other than testing.)

This is not to say that there aren't still all-too-many sites which have clearly never been tested with more than one browser, and which often fail when using anything else. But they're a lot rarer than they used to be. It's been a long time since I encountered one personally, though I do still hear horror stories from people.

Anyway, your IBDb problem seems like it's about your configuration or your distro's build or something, because it's definitely not firefox-specific. Which is a real pain, and I sympathize, and I freely admit that using a different browser is going to be the easiest way to deal with the problem, whatever its actual cause. At least for now. So yes, it's good we can all run different browsers when we want. :)

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 22:16 UTC (Wed) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (3 responses)

FWIW: that trailer works fine in Firefox for me. You're probably missing a video codec.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 22:19 UTC (Wed) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (2 responses)

Do you have the OpenH264 Video Codec plugin installed? (See Tools → Add-ons → Plugins)

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 8:24 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't have this plugin, and this page work OK, both audio and video (and they're even synchronized!).
But I think firefox uses media libs from the OS now, even on Linux. Was it ffmpeg or gstreamer, I don't remember. So local variations in these libraries could cause different results on video playback for users.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 10:10 UTC (Thu) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link]

Thanks for all the answers

I am in Debian unstable
I had the necessary gstreamer libraries listed here https://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel already installed.

The culprit looks like it was about:config media.gmp-gmpopenh264.enabled. It is found here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1042708
I turned it to false, restarted firefox and it works.

Thanks everybody once more. I thought it was a firefox problem and not a configuration problem on my side. Next time I will plug my desktop to the power outlet first before I speak :-)

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 21, 2016 23:17 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

Indeed there is no point in having "pure Gnome experience" but a good out of the box end user desktop experience which means using applications that are maintained and work ( and that does not always goes hand in hand with what comes out of the Gnome community ) or are familiar to end users like firefox, thunderbird,chrome vlc etc.

If asked what does "pure gnome experience" mean I would answer based on decade of experience of usage for myself and supporting other users on it, the "pure Gnome experience" means half integrated half broken desktop environment and applications for the end user or put in one word "unfinished".

I dont even know why that blog post ( which makes little to no sense to me ) is even considered news worthy but at least it highlights Gnome applications which might cause difficulty in removal and being replaced if someone wants to provide good desktop experience on the Gnome desktop environment but not "pure Gnome experience".

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 0:49 UTC (Thu) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] (1 responses)

I think this obsession with giving users ever less choices was started back when Sun (IIRC) funded some basic usability testing. As far as I can tell, Gnome has ever since confused "provide sensible defaults", which is good, with "eliminate choice", which still isn't the same thing at all, at all.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 3:08 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

Wait I'm confused, this blog is only about defaults. It has really nothing to do with choice? You can simply choose to uninstall the apps that come by default, and install new ones, right?

(Well, some are un-uninstallable currently, but as I mentioned in the blog, that's a recognized problem and we intend to fix it.)

Distros can choose whether they want to ship GNOME the way it's intended to be shipped, or to not. Some will, some won't. Depends on goals, target audience, etc.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 17:56 UTC (Thu) by bandrami (guest, #94229) [Link] (6 responses)

Empathy seems like a surprising thing to leave out of core (chat is pretty crucial nowadays, though I guess there are web clients). Is there a specific quality issue there?

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 22, 2016 21:21 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link]

Ever since all the major chat silos turned off XMPP support one after another Empathy's been mostly useless. Plus it shows up uninvited whenever I start up Polari, and then leaves all my IRC channels if I close the unwanted Enpathy window, forcing me to rejoin them all one by one in Polari.

That last part was an apt-get remove'able offence.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 23, 2016 7:42 UTC (Fri) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link]

One reason that it's been removed from the default install of Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 Beta is that empathy still hasn't been ported to webkitgtk 2. webkitgtk2 receives regular security updates and advisories unlike the older webkitgtk.

The other reason is that it doesn't support the most commonly used chat services (because chat providers closed their protocols). Because of this, there's less investment in maintaining empathy and its libraries.

It was already removed from Ubuntu (Unity)'s default install for 16.04 LTS for the same reasons.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 23, 2016 13:53 UTC (Fri) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (3 responses)

There are many quality issues (e.g. hiding important functionality in app menus, cumbersome multi-window UI, tab bar interface doesn't scale to many chat rooms, depends on WebKit1), but if quality was the only problem it would have been listed under Incubator. Unfortunately the Internet chat ecosystem has been moving to proprietary walled gardens and a chat client that supports a bunch of protocols that few people use anymore, no matter how nice the client is, is just not generally useful. Nowadays everyone seems to be using Whatsapp or Snapchat and how sad is that? but that's our reality.

Empathy is one of the first things I install myself, but I'm one of very few GNOME folks still using it.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 23, 2016 14:28 UTC (Fri) by bandrami (guest, #94229) [Link] (2 responses)

Fair point. I spend most of my working day on hipchat (which empathy works great with, though I tend to use emacs's jabber client nowadays) but I can acknowledge that's not that common a use-case. Sad that the state of chat is less open than it was 20 years ago.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 23, 2016 14:34 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Couple of possibilities for supporting Snapchat/Whatsapp in Empathy:

https://github.com/filfat/swiftsnapper
https://davidgf.net/whatsapp/

Personally, lack of OTR support kept me away from Empathy more than lack of support for proprietary protocols.

Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps

Posted Sep 23, 2016 16:52 UTC (Fri) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

There are actually patches for OTR support, but nobody is maintaining Telepathy so they're stuck in Bugzilla. So a volunteer is needed. If it were maintained, maybe we wouldn't be here right now.