What People Are Saying About GNOME [Part 1]

Phoronix: What People Are Saying About GNOME [Part 1]

Last week the 2011 GNOME User Survey began, which is an independent survey that was devised by members of the GNOME community to collect feedback on their desktop platform. With the GNOME Foundation not interested in hosting the survey, these survey creators came to Phoronix to host the survey. Some of the initial GNOME comments were shared shortly after the survey went live. This survey will be running for one month, but there were already more than 8,000 submissions in the first few days. Here's the first 1,000 comments provided by participants of the GNOME survey.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16581

I agree with the users who ask for more documentation for developing programs. Right now it's a mess. Ok, to be fair, for C it's alright, although it's not the most complete and thorough documentation out there, but for any other supported language you're on your own.
Here's the deal: The user wants to make a program using a high-level programming language, so he chooses Python or JavaScript. JavaScript documentation simply doesn't exist. Zero. Nothing. Zilch. PyGTK is deprecated, yet it's the only thing that's properly documented as finding anything that relates to PyGO is very hard. Usually it's just examples on how to port existing PyGTK projects. The problem is that having never done anything in PyGTK, it's hard to even know where to begin due to the whole PYGO vs PyGTK debacle...
Right now I'm giving Quickly a go, but even that is far from ideal as there are conflicts in the very own files it generates that prevent the built program from working correctly without modifications to the ui file. Bottom line, if you want to learn how to make GTK programs go with C. Don't know C? You'll save time if you learn C first and then go back to making the actual program.

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Originally Posted by devius

I agree with the users who ask for more documentation for developing programs. Right now it's a mess. Ok, to be fair, for C it's alright, although it's not the most complete and thorough documentation out there, but for any other supported language you're on your own.
Here's the deal: The user wants to make a program using a high-level programming language, so he chooses Python or JavaScript. JavaScript documentation simply doesn't exist. Zero. Nothing. Zilch. PyGTK is deprecated, yet it's the only thing that's properly documented as finding anything that relates to PyGO is very hard. Usually it's just examples on how to port existing PyGTK projects. The problem is that having never done anything in PyGTK, it's hard to even know where to begin due to the whole PYGO vs PyGTK debacle...
Right now I'm giving Quickly a go, but even that is far from ideal as there are conflicts in the very own files it generates that prevent the built program from working correctly without modifications to the ui file. Bottom line, if you want to learn how to make GTK programs go with C. Don't know C? You'll save time if you learn C first and then go back to making the actual program.

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You just have to learn one or two rules how the C API is transformed to Python or JavaScript and then you can use the C API documentation.

I don't want to read all 1000 comments, I only looked through them to confirm that my one was there... Anyway, I found it as #141 on page 2.

Installed Kubuntu 11.10, gnome3 problem solved ;)

My last experience with kde was back in the kde2 days and I didn't like it then, but I am really happy with kubuntu now, and it works better than expected, Gnome have to do something drastic before i go back.

And to all thinking about switching to something else:

DO IT!!

You could always switch back, or to something else if you don't like it.

After all the anger I had at them, after I called them ***holes, etc, I am no longer mad at them. I don't even hate gnome developers.

They are just sick. Their mind is fixated on creating an 'usable' desktop and they don't care if there will be 1 user that still finds it really usable.
Al long as it is 'usable' in their opinion, they will continue with that.

I'''ll say that this sickness happens every time too much ideology is involved, and peoples blindly follow it without applying common sense.
Same sickness is shared with Greenies that buy overpriced solar panels even though they pollute environment even more that plain coal, or demand electric cars, even though to run an electric car one needs even more fossil fuel, etc.

And obivosly, Gnome developers don't care about Linux face, about its worlwide usage, or anything. All they want is their utopian 'usable' desktop.
I'll tell you: Tell a gnome developer that Gnome 4 will be based on windows, but will contain some uber 'usable' features, and they will agree.

So, the right solution for everyone that ether cares about Linux or just needs to get his job done, is just stop using Gnome, just depart from it, and let only true fanboys use it. They will always love it, _regardless_ of anything.

But we, ordinary users should just switch to something else and be safe from such anti-user attitude.

And to all Gnome 3 lovers here: Eventually they will remove the features you need, the hour for that just didn't come.
Remember, first they came for communists....

I don't get the people who don't like gnome or gnome3. I recently downloaded the latest fedora and tried it out.

It's awesome. It looks great, it does what you want it to do, it doesn't resemble any of the crappiness that is macos, windows or even kde, and I could even imagine using it on a daily basis, if my system weren't already perfectly customised to my needs.

And that's the problem with the whole thing. You're asking geeks, linux geeks, what they think of gnome. Of course they'd think it's crap, since it very much limits their freedom in using their computers exactly as they want. But that's the problem of the argument here. You're asking the wrong people for feedback. Ask windows users. Cause if you want to use your computer exactly the way you want, you usually don't use gnome. Or kde. Or even xfce. Most people who care to such depth go to the length of putting their own desktop / non-desktop environment together to maximise their output. They typically go for the today very common combination of openbox / tint2 / conky, which is in itself a lot of more workflow-orientated and productive than clicking around stuff.

Working just keyboard-based is MUCH faster than any combination of mouse and keyboard, and if you know your way around shortcuts, I'd assume you can get most done stuff in half the time (at least that was my impression after switching to vi from any other editor). MOST of the time spent on a computer today is actually the overhead of switching between programmes, saving files, opening new programmes and closing old ones, compiling, checking stuff, editing configuration files. If you can minimise this overhead and leave more room for actual content, you can get a lot more stuff done.

But gnome is simply not around for that kind of workflow. Instead, show it to any typical windows user, and I think they'd love it. You know, windows, where customisation isn't really a huge part of the equation and a fifty fifty of working well and looking good is the main idea.

I mean, I find it good that we have it all in this ecosystem. We have gnome for these beautiful desktops that do what you want, we have kde for... hm, I guess people who have an other sense of beauty and usefulness, we have xfce for getting more or less the same stuff done with less beauty and on older computers, and we have the do-it-yourself desktops. This is a thousand times better than any windows or mac environment, and I love it. So what's there to complain about?

Just my 2 cents, and I'm not close to being a gnome user.

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to to begin in a more manageable way, coming out today are the first thousand comments collected from this 2011 GNOME survey (for anyone that requests it, at the end will also be a PDF with all of the comments).

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LOL. Do you expect anyone to actually read all this?

Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of them stink.

Oh my. Take one was an opinionated piece of crap. Take two is unloading 1K of comments on readers. Dear Phoronix, take a break. You're clearly out of ideas.

It would have been better to publish the gist and some interesting comments and giving a link to the pdf of all comments instead.

This is less useful then a big dump of random words.