GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 12:56 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center by Kluge
Parent article: GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

> No one blames GNOME for doing something new. People blame GNOME for doing things that suit developers and not users.

First, developers are users too.

Or are you genuinely complaining about low-level technical decisions like shell extensions are implemented in javsacript as opposed to C# or whatever?

Second, my anectdotal experience is that just-plain-office-drone-type-users pick up gnome 3 just fine with no handholding beyond gnome's builtin "welcome to gnome" tutorial. They all just use whatever is put in front of them. (And incidently, these same just-plain-users manage to get a non-locked-down Windows installation completely full of malware within days..)

It's the self-titled "power users" that are the complainers; not because it is too haaaaard to learn something new but because they want everything just the way they want it, with nothing changing except for the visible things they want to change. It's always upon the "Developers" to "nerd harder" to make exactly what these users want.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 15:30 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (6 responses)

This is becoming a tangent, but with GNOME it's far more likely to be in front of a nerd than an office drone, so while I do appreciate the commitment to design and simplicity, the user stories should maybe be weighted toward Developer/Operations workstations, without losing the usability that allows other office workers and home users to share in the experience. Know your audience.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 19:42 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

> Know your audience.

....What makes you think GNOME doesn't "know their audience"?

In a sense this is actually a circular argument; Gnome's audience is the folks who like the approach that Gnome has taken for the past *fifteen years* [1]

Those that didn't like that approach forked G2 to create Mate, and G3 to create Cinnamon. Neither is anywhere near as popular as upstream G3.

[1] It's much older than that; there's a clear progression going back to the pre-G2 days.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 21:28 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

Completely stagnant Linux desktop market share?

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 30, 2024 14:50 UTC (Sat) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (3 responses)

So GNOME should increase the desktop market share by… doing what the existing, hard core user base of Linux wants, as opposed to appealing to other, different user bases?

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 30, 2024 18:49 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> So GNOME should increase the desktop market share by… doing what the existing, hard core user base of Linux wants

You know, actually yes. Not annoying your _existing_ users is a good first step. When your adoption is driven by word-of-mouth and social networks and not through ads and marketing, alienating your core users will not help you at all.

The other stupid blunder was the belief that people will switch to GNOME because it's so much more different than everything else. Dynamic "Activities" were completely unlike any other environment (Windows or MacOS). Needless to say, it hadn't happened.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Apr 4, 2024 12:40 UTC (Thu) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link] (1 responses)

Most actual users are not annoyed, or they would be using something else. Gnome 2 users who didn't like v3 have been annoyed for 12 years and don't seem to be happy enough with their new Mate/Cinnamon clone. It's not like anyone is forcing you to use Gnome; that's the whole point of free desktops.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Apr 4, 2024 16:42 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Most actual users are not annoyed, or they would be using something else.

Well, yes. I switched from GNOME to xfce and then to macOS. I know a couple of hardcore Linux people who went down the same route.

GNOME in later releases walked back most of the initial stupidity, and that also helped.