GNOME Is Still A Ways Off From 10% Goal

[ChrisXY]

Yes, Gnome 3 is far from perfect but many things are nice and interesting. The performance of the Clutter/Mutter/Metacity/Gnome Shell UI blows Kwin/Plasma out of the water. KDE often feels unbelievably sluggish in comparison.

Well, at least the kwin developers have recently actually profiled kwin and acknowledged that it has performance problems. This has partly been addressed already but will still be tweaked in the near future.

And there are also great differences with different settings. I'm talking about the radeon open source driver: The raster graphics system is still much faster than the Xrender graphics system. When not on the high power profile, but on mid or low you can't really use opengl compositing as windows will lagg behind horribly when moving, much, much worse when additionally enabling the opengl2 shaders. the Xrender compositing is actually quite fast but when scrolling in firefox it still "feels" much faster when not using any compositing.

But it's true for most KDE programs: They are quite heavy compared to their counterparts in leightweight DEs... Opening dolphin vs opening thunar is really a big difference...

[pingufunkybeat]

I find it curious that GTK, being the supposedly lesser toolkit, seems to foster great apps such as Chromium, Inkscape, Shotwell, Firefox, Thunderbird, The Gimp etc whereas the Qt side of things have a tendency to get stuck at infrastructure plumbing and overly complex ideas about UIs and outside of KDE, rarely deliver brilliant apps.

Thunderbird and Firefox are not GTK apps. Also, there are really good Qt apps out there which blow everything else out of the water, such as Amarok (especially the older versions), K3b and Anki.

The problem with Qt apps is not in the toolkit -- it is professional and probably the best toolkit on the market, for any platform. There are two problems -- the traditional resistance of the Linux community towards it, fueled by the early license issues and by its corporate backing. Big Linux names such as Red Hat chose to throw their weight (and money) behind GTK, which was seen as more community-driven, and to try to bring it up to par. Big funders of Linux felt uncomfortable basing a desktop on a toolkit whose success was largely influenced by a single company, and was therefore difficult to control.

The second problem is that GNOME and GTK apps are heavily funded by Red Hat and co., while KDE is almost exclusively a community effort. In essence, GNOME has always been the corporate desktop (Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Ximian, Eazel, Canonical, and who knows how many other corporate backers), while KDE was the community desktop which built upon the corporate-developed Qt.

Personally, I use KDE 4.4 on Debian stable for daily work. It hasn't crashed in over a year. Flamers will flame, and most of the time they have no clue, so you should just find what works for you, and use that. Having used KDE since 1.1.2 on Red Hat 5.3, I find that I like the project and the vision they have. And the undeniable mistakes that they have made pale in comparison (IMHO) with the disastrous decisions behind GNOME. I've experimented with FVWM, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Compiz and Enlightenment, and always end up going back to KDE in the end because it lets me do things the way I want to do them and gives me all the tools I need. Other people should use what best suits their workflow -- for me, GNOME Shell and Unity are simply unusable, even more than a Mac.

[korpenkraxar]

Thunderbird and Firefox are not GTK apps. Also, there are really good Qt apps out there which blow everything else out of the water, such as Amarok (especially the older versions), K3b and Anki.

The problem with Qt apps is not in the toolkit -- it is professional and probably the best toolkit on the market, for any platform. There are two problems -- the traditional resistance of the Linux community towards it, fueled by the early license issues and by its corporate backing. Big Linux names such as Red Hat chose to throw their weight (and money) behind GTK, which was seen as more community-driven, and to try to bring it up to par. Big funders of Linux felt uncomfortable basing a desktop on a toolkit whose success was largely influenced by a single company, and was therefore difficult to control.

The second problem is that GNOME and GTK apps are heavily funded by Red Hat and co., while KDE is almost exclusively a community effort. In essence, GNOME has always been the corporate desktop (Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Ximian, Eazel, Canonical, and who knows how many other corporate backers), while KDE was the community desktop which built upon the corporate-developed Qt.

Personally, I use KDE 4.4 on Debian stable for daily work. It hasn't crashed in over a year. Flamers will flame, and most of the time they have no clue, so you should just find what works for you, and use that. Having used KDE since 1.1.2 on Red Hat 5.3, I find that I like the project and the vision they have. And the undeniable mistakes that they have made pale in comparison (IMHO) with the disastrous decisions behind GNOME. I've experimented with FVWM, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Compiz and Enlightenment, and always end up going back to KDE in the end because it lets me do things the way I want to do them and gives me all the tools I need. Other people should use what best suits their workflow -- for me, GNOME Shell and Unity are simply unusable, even more than a Mac.

I completely see your points and just for the record, I am a big fan of KDE as well and used it exclusively from 1.1 to 3.5. I agree there are great Qt apps out there but the only cross platform ones I use on a regular basis outside of the KDE ecosystem (in my vague definition including apps such as Amarok and Digikam) are Skype and Spotify, both of which are closed source :-(

Anyways, I have come to realize I am actually part of a tiny minority that love the diversity of free desktops and GUIs as I do a well stocked wine cellar or ale collection. Up until recently I thought my enthusiasm over diversity and change in the FLOSS world was the norm but I have come to realize that this is not the case.

[drag]

Anyways, I have come to realize I am actually part of a tiny minority that love the diversity of free desktops and GUIs as I do a well stocked wine cellar or ale collection. Up until recently I thought my enthusiasm over diversity and change in the FLOSS world was the norm but I have come to realize that this is not the case.

It's not whether or not people appreciate or gain pleasure from diversity. It's the gradual maturing and understanding that having a huge amount of software that essentially does the same thing leads to very poor usability, wasted efforts, and poor reliability.

The Linux desktop has always been 'promising', but it has always suffered from fractured userland and poor engineering. It suffers from a huge amount of duplicate effort combined with gaping missing functionality.

Having 6 different panels, 14 different window managers, 23 different editors, 8 different browsers, 7 different file managers, etc etc... all that is fine and dandy, but when you have all that and nobody can get a fucking microphone working to save their lives you have a serious usability issue with your desktop.

Oh your thinking about running Linux desktop in your business?

Don't worry that nothing we have reads your file formats, that your printers are a huge pain in the ass to get working, that there is no cost effective way to manage users and desktop configurations across your desktops, that there is no email client compatible with your groupware, and that by the time you get your desktop stuff sorted out the vendor has stopped supporting it and you have to start all over....
* we have a 4 different low resource file managers you can use!
* we have 30 different plugins for reading RSS feeds for Emacs!
* we have a alternative browser that is not compatible with any plugins and will not render most of your internal websites correctly, but it can provide a virtual file system over ftp that won't work with most of the applications we give you!

It's hard to champion having lots of choices when none of the choices do what you actually need to be done.

[Aleve Sicofante]

And me, in all my curiosity and naivity, copied the spreadgnome.org link to the address bar and hit return.

Now I leave you, dear readers, to see yourselves where this story ends, certainly not far from where it's begun. This site is getting more crappy each day that goes by.

Wow, that's disgusting. I would expect some explanation from Michael. I'm a usual reader of this site and I'm really disappointed to learn the owner can go that low. I'm sure there's an explanation. I hope Michael offers it.

[Aleve Sicofante]

Many years ago I had started work on a GNOME news site... When that faded away I offered transferring the spreadGNOME.org domain gratis to the GNOME Foundation, but they weren't interested.

Well, that PARTIALLY explains what you've done, but why did you keep the domain (that costs money, even if little) and the redirection?

I come here for information and I expect that to come from someone that plays clean. I'm very disappointed with all this.

[Michael]

Well, that PARTIALLY explains what you've done, but why did you keep the domain (that costs money, even if little) and the redirection?

I come here for information and I expect that to come from someone that plays clean. I'm very disappointed with all this.

As soon as I'd forego the registration it would get picked up by squatters.... Look at http://www.nouveau-driver.org/ when previously was using that for collecting IRC logs and didn't bother renewing it and now that goes to garbage sites. I usually always keep domains renewed even if they've been dormant for years.

[XorEaxEax]

Thunderbird and Firefox are not GTK apps.

I'm pretty sure they are, both have gtk2 as dependencies and gtk2 theming affects the appearance of both.

As for GTK vs Qt, Gnome vs KDE, I couldn't care less. I have apps using both toolkits on my system and they both work well, I don't use a DE (sticking with openbox) and as such I can't comment on their respective strenghts and weaknesses but seriously this infighting is getting old. Obviously both Gnome and KDE devs have different views of how the desktop should look and operate, so there's no wasted effort since Gnome devs have no interest in working on KDE and KDE devs have no interest in working on Gnome. What's next, complaints about how Linux and BSD are wasting their efforts instead of 'working together'?, Firefox and Chrome? Windows and OSX? Iphone and Android?

[curaga]

I'm pretty sure they are, both have gtk2 as dependencies and gtk2 theming affects the appearance of both.

At least you used to be able to build FF for X, gtk1, gtk2, or qt. Perhaps not any more.

[susikala]

I think people are missing two points. First, toolkits do not spawn software. At least they aren't supposed to if the software is well designed, since the interface is not the most important part (I would personally argue the least important). Specifically when talking about a browser, I'd go for speed, correctness (of rendering) and stability every day over a sleek design. I don't need any interface, something like uzbl is perfectly fine. (User) Interfaces are highly overestimated in the industry, and that leads to so much bad software. So toolkits do not spawn stuff, they're merely there to offer a comfortable user interface abstraction.

Second is the direction gnome is going. I think it is good. Really good. Simpler is better, since the world is getting dumber and all those kids playing with their facebooks, twitters and smartphones want a simple interface. They don't want a thousand choices etc., they're apple fanchildren-like in their approach to software -- it should work and I don't care about the details (thank you Steve Jobs for that). If we disregard for a moment the fact this is a very dangerous mindset, it is the prevailing mindset today amongst the younger people and growingly everyone. Now, you can say screw it and go with a complicated beast such as kde which no one eventually would really want to use, or you can say flow with it and do what gnome does, simplifying and streamlining things. If I can't change the mentality of the population, I can at least try to give it what it wants in the form of FOSS software and not some horrible apple stuff.

So from my perspective, gnome is actually doing the right thing. I'm no gnome user. I downloaded the last fedora and played with it. It really does look amazing. It looks beautiful. There are almost no options to configure, but it mostly just works. Obviously it's garbage for my personal workflow, since I work with tiling window managers and mostly with the keyboard, but that is not to say I cannot appreciate what gnome is trying to do. They're tapping to the times, and it's a good thing. They're doing a pretty good job at it, too.

So disregard for a moment the sensationalist lack of quality of this article -- the point is gnome is doing something good, and we should all appreciate it.