Some challenges for GNOME online accounts

Posted Feb 14, 2019 21:43 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
In reply to: Some challenges for GNOME online accounts by colo
Parent article: Some challenges for GNOME online accounts

Not supporting the tools that people actually use is going to result in pain and disappointed, frustrated users. Life is compromise, and ultimately you need to provide the tools that people want to use. When releasing products, you can't keep fighting yesterday's battles; you have to keep up with today's needs.

Taking applications and verifying them in some sort of way that you can trust them and prevent all harm is never. gonna. happen. Perfect is never. gonna. happen. Now let's talk about how we're going to provide a variety of programs in a way that minimizes the potential harm from those programs.

The actual, already existing audience for free, libre desktop applications is shrinking. I used Gnumeric in the past, but now I use Google Sheets for my minimal spreadsheeting needs. It's accessible where I need it to be. I go to Wolfram Alpha for many types of calculations I might have opened up bc for or wrote some code. Evolve or die.

Some challenges for GNOME online accounts

Posted Feb 18, 2019 14:06 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (3 responses)

And why is that so? Because Free Software Desktop projects wanted nothing to do with server-side computing, spent years removing any trace of the *nix network-centric heritage from their software, and then, when end-user systems started getting an always on network connexion just like the unix workstations of old, jumped on proprietary cloud services as a magic solution to avoid working with free software server people.

And now computing is becoming network-centric. And proprietary cloud services only care about their own desktop frontends. Tough luck. It is easier for Microsoft, to pivot into being a Linux cloud provider, than for free software Desktop projects to admit their windows 95 target is DOA, that Android would not exist without the Google cloud, and that they need to work on what happen on the other side of the network link.

Some challenges for GNOME online accounts

Posted Feb 18, 2019 23:12 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (2 responses)

Did you work on systems that made server-side computing more accessible to the average user? It's easy to criticize in retrospect, but much harder to anticipate and put the work in.

For one big example of the problem, compare GitHub to GitLab. I'm going to assume they're at feature parity, but I haven't really looked at GitLab. Because setting up my own GitLab on my own computers wouldn't make it available outside my apartment, and setting it up on a cloud service would take a bunch of time, for little value, and I'd lose all the connections GitHub gives me, the ease of access and notice from other people. There are other GitHub-like websites, but GitHub is good enough feature-wise and all the others lack those connections. Since it is a server I don't run or control, the money has got to be coming from somewhere, be it ads (like Google) or proprietary extra-cost add-ons (like GitHub).

I'm pretty sure that the *nix network-centric heritage was not simply going to lead to Android gold; the ideas and models are quite different. Could GNOME and KDE have done better? Surely; but I'm not seeing where they could have amazingly side-stepped Google. Servers aren't free, and that's the hard part of this.

Some challenges for GNOME online accounts

Posted Feb 19, 2019 6:12 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not a means problem. It's 100% a project culture problem.

Owncloud built a useful server-to-end-user solution and got funding.
Matrix build a useful connected solution and got funding and a FOSDEM keynote.
Collabora is webifying Libreoffice and is getting funding.

What do they have in common? They all address the kind of non-unixy end user GNOME would like to attract. They all focus on helping users getting things done instead of pretty app demonstrators that are useless in the real life and where half the functionality is disabled for no reason anyone can understand. (who uses GNOME Web in real life?)

GNOME could have chosen to support any one of them, or take the FreedomBox and run with it, or do its own server-side thing, instead it chose things like GOA that would never give it any ability independent from what proprietary cloud owner were ready to concede at any given time.

Some challenges for GNOME online accounts

Posted Mar 9, 2019 11:54 UTC (Sat) by zarrro (guest, #54749) [Link]

I actually use my Own cloud via GOA on my Fedora machine, and it works quite well.
I find the Gnome approach of mounting OC, instead of syncing a local directory, works much better for my usage.