Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 3:05 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update by raven667
Parent article: Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Reading other comments and thinking about it more, if GNOME was a product team and not community driven then I think they should pick a specific kind of user to cater to, like creative professionals such as audio/video artists and sysadmins/software developers, and make the core experience about that. Those users have work to do, and need an appliance with a browser, terminal, text editor, screenshot and image viewer, audio and video player, file organizer, support for video conferencing and screen sharing, maybe file sync with Google Drive or MS OneDrive and run a handful of professional apps such as vscode, audacity, blender or autocad.

I would think about moving the apps which are not supporting that use case out into independent projects and flatpaks, so those who volunteer on them and use them can still do so. There could be a SIG for mobile phone/tablet (Maps, Calls) or home user desktop (Photos, Music) or whatever for contributors who are more interested in their niche.

I look at a project like vscode for inspiration, out of the box it is just a plain text editor, but you can learn the keybindings, command pallette and settings as much or as little as you want, extending it through plugins to rival emacs in functionality, without breaking the simplicity of the core experience of editing text files. I like a desktop the same way, where the core experience is very simple, advanced features exist and you can learn them as much or as little as you want, and you can extend it with simple plugins without breaking the core simplicity. I tend to find many "powerful" tools to have complex and surprising behavior that makes them less useful, so I really appreciate the GNOME focus on simplicity, I just wish they had the resources to keep more than just the core polished and high quality.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 8:46 UTC (Sun) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480) [Link] (4 responses)

> I just wish they had the resources [...]

This sounds great and all because it is always true to at least some extent, but somewhere in there is also an expectation for projects to use the resources they have available *efficiently*.

From the outside the GNOME project appears to love wasting as much resources as it can making "they have limited resources therefore my experience will suck" a little hard to swallow. Things would look a lot better if instead of rewriting everything all the time in the latest fad* they would focus resources on maintain things. Perhaps they could put off making up new "Human Interface Guidelines" all the time to justify sweeping UI changes and, instead, maintain what they have. Perhaps it would be a little more resource efficient if, instead of breaking API of core libraries (e.g. GTK) forcing porting efforts all over the place, they would put in some effort to keep the API stable.

*: Initially GNOME was written in C. Sometime they made up Vala and decided to (re)write things in that. Then they decided to (re)write some things in javascript. Now it seems like they want to (re)write things in Rust. In the early days there was also some implication that they want to (re)write things in C#, though not sure if anything ever was in C#. Sorry, but if you have resources for this many rewrites then, I think, you should have resources to maintain decent apps.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 10:11 UTC (Sun) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

Yes there was a C# wave, with for example Banshee (music player). There is still MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio (IDE).

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 15:46 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

> Things would look a lot better if instead of rewriting everything all the time in the latest fad* they would focus resources on maintain things

This is what always happens when you relying on volunteers a lot. Volunteers want to have "fun" and you can't blame them because no one pays them.

Note you can of course be a professional during the day and a volunteer at night, these are not mutually exclusive.

Sometimes corporations also fund "former volunteers" without the former having much power over the later - because there's no one else available to do the work.

When a corporation really wants to focus a project and finds the resources to do so, it just forks. Apple for instance has frequently done that.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 9:01 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

> This is what always happens when you relying on volunteers a lot. Volunteers want to have "fun" and you can't blame them because no one pays them.

Volunteers also want some fame which means lots of other useful code to build upon and shine. Gnome is reaching the point where its platform has been completely diluted by years of half assed unfinished fad-of-the-day rewrites and its value proposition for new developpers is approaching zero.

Remember that if all started by reusing the GIMP UI toolkit and was supposed to fix and generalize it to make it easier to write many useful FLOSS apps. And now it has exhausted its potential to the point that just maintaining a simple stupid official image viewer is deemed to be hard.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 20:10 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> And now it has exhausted its potential to the point that just maintaining a simple stupid official image viewer is deemed to be hard.

But if this all started life as a GIMP-based project, can't they just fork GIMP, rip out all of the editing functionality and, uh, call it a day? That doesn't sound hard to me. Is there some property of the GIMP codebase that makes it harder than it sounds?