GNOME Is Losing Relevance On The Linux Desktop

[9a3eedi]

I think the reason why GNOME is starting to lose relevance is two-fold
1- Their interface isn't something that "hardcore Linux users" like at all (they tend to prefer the traditional desktop, or something technically simple like xfce or awesome or whatever), unlike gnome 2
2- The people who would probably like GNOME 3 are most likely the type who would also use Ubuntu, and Ubuntu switched to Unity, so that's a huge loss in market share, I think.

As much as I hate what the developers did to GNOME 3, I still think it would be a shame to see it go, as it used to be probably the most popular DE out there, and I hope all the best for it.

Here's what a Gnome user who used KDE (4.2 - 4.6) for about 1 year thinks about KDE...

I agree to this. I've also tried 4.7 and 4.8 and I still seem to have the same issues. I keep reading a lot on the internet how amazing KDE is and how it's the better of the DE avaliable for Linux, but I don't know how they're doing it.. it just seems rather unpolished with me whenever I use it. There's a very noticeable latency when compared to other DE's, loits of graphical errors here and there, and I did have to tweak a lot of my settings in order to get it to work nicely. The desktop effects are annoying too (everything just keeps fading into each other, it looks wierd), and when you disable it (which I'm thankful for the option), the whole desktop seems to slow down.

Mind you, I still think it's better than Unity and GNOME 3, and the amount of effort they've put into the desktop is just admirable as it really is full-featured compared to what other DE's offer, but for now I'd much rather use GNOME 2 (or MATE)

When KDE decide to radically change from KDE3 to KDE4, the negative reaction shows KDE was right after several releases later.

For me, the comments only exposes the selftiness of some users themselves. Before somebody replies to my post, one needs ask oneself: when facing a new users who never tried any DE in their lifetime, are you going to display your bias when it comes to your preference or you will let them try first?

The negative reaction to KDE 4.0 was because KDE4.0 (and the first early versions of KDE4) really were bad. Things were broken, stuff didn't work, lots of features from KDE3 just weren't there, and in general it felt as if the KDE team focused more on looks rather than functionality (which is what a lot of DE developers seem to be doing these days). Now it's not like that anymore, they seem to have listened to the criticism and have greatly improved upon it over the years.

As for the question of how I would react if a new user tries a new DE, I would naturally display my bias as I'm only human.. but I'd make them try out other DE's and let them decide for themselves. A lot of users tend to pick the "prettier" looking DE, but as we all know, pretty doesn't always mean better.. otherwise Metro UI would be the most amazing desktop evironment ever.

[spirtbrat]

Michael,

I'm tired of your bias towards certain projects. You do do nice, interesting benchmarks and that's what made this site popular. That's the reason I visit it. I also understand you make some good money advertising here, so lately you try to post more "articles". Please, be aware that expressing your personal opinion on a daily basis is not the best thing to do when you call your "articles" - news.

Maybe you aim for a bigger activity on your forum in the form of fantalk or flamebait. Possibly. As a regular reader of Phoronix I've become quite familiar with your indifference to the KDE project, your affinity to Linux over BSD and your affection, almost devotion, to Ubuntu. You never miss a chance to highlight your favorites' traits or hide their, often big, shortcomings.

Phoronix has become the place to express your personal opinion. For me it is losing relevance as a Linux _news_ source. I can't consider it as such anymore.

[n3wu53r]

Michael,

I'm tired of your bias towards certain projects. You do do nice, interesting benchmarks and that's what made this site popular. That's the reason I visit it. I also understand you make some good money advertising here, so lately you try to post more "articles". Please, be aware that expressing your personal opinion on a daily basis is not the best thing to do when you call your "articles" - news.

Maybe you aim for a bigger activity on your forum in the form of fantalk or flamebait. Possibly. As a regular reader of Phoronix I've become quite familiar with your indifference to th
e KDE project, your affinity to Linux over BSD and your affection, almost devotion, to Ubuntu. You never miss a chance to highlight your favorites' traits or hide their, often big, shortcomings.

Phoronix has become the place to express your personal opinion. For me it is losing relevance as a Linux _news_ source. I can't consider it as such anymore.

Michael is not the one saying Gnome is loosing relevancy, the Gnome developer who wrote the blogpost is. Michael just happens to agree.

[boast]

A lot of users tend to pick the "prettier" looking DE, but as we all know, pretty doesn't always mean better.. otherwise Metro UI would be the most amazing desktop evironment ever.

Lets be reality. If you put a computer with windows aero, and one with openbox, 90% of ppl (random percentage out of my ass) would pick aero. Same with openbox vs KDE. Or lxde vs KDE.

If I installed on my moms computer something like this http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3160/...956bb3c729.jpg instead of chakra, she would be pissed.

[alcalde]

Agreed 100%. And having tried almost any linux desktop environment / window manager out there, I still find Gnome 3 a much better choice than the others (unless you're using an old pc, in which case I'd use xfce and/or openbox). Gnome 3 is fast and intuitive, works fine on my netbook (unlike KDE) and I can almost avoid using the mouse (unlike Gnome 2).

KDE doesn't work fine on your netbook? I run KDE on a laptop with a single core 1.8GHZ 32bit AMD Sempron processor with 512MB DDR and a 4200rpm 70GB IDE hard drive. I tried XFCE and LXDE on it, but the dramatic loss of features wasn't worth saving 50MB of memory.

How can Gnome be intuitive? KDE uses the standard desktop metaphor that's been in use for almost 20 years. There's nothing more intuitive than that.

[spirtbrat]

Michael is not the one saying Gnome is loosing relevancy, the Gnome developer who wrote the blogpost is. Michael just happens to agree.

Of course he didn't wrote the "staring into the abyss" article. But he thought it is good opportunity to point out the Cinnamon and the Mate projects, as they are bringing those good old memories about the GNOME 2.0 desktop.

There are more of his thoughts, likings and opinions. Like those for example:

"The negativity towards the GNOME project isn't surprising since the botched GNOME 3.0 release."

"Prior to reading Otte's GNOME abyss blog post last night, I myself was thinking of what desktop environment to use next. For nearly two years my main production desktop has been Ubuntu 10.10 with GNOME 2.32 virtualized within Mac OS X on an Apple MacBook Pro. With my new retina MacBook Pro, it's time to move past Ubuntu 10.10 and the most pressing problem has been missing GNOME2."


Every interactive application - being either console or graphical one - is enforcing a certain way of work flow. A way that the developers thought it may be the best one for this king of activity. Take for example the once hugely vibrant competition between Vim and Emacs - two overpowered text editors with very different manner of achieving the same goals.
Also the various console mail clients.
Or even the numerous Unix (-like) kernels at the time when they were not so different from one another.
The thing that made them distinguishable were their philosophy which explains their different way of achieving same common goals.

GNOME 3 _is_ different and it is different for a reason. You _cannot_ work the same way, like you did with every graphical interface since Win95. If you need to use your old work flow for whatever reason (no time to figure out how to be as productive with the new tool, no appreciation of the benefits it brings you, or just plain stubbornness), then you _have to_ chose another graphical environment. Here is a recent interview that Michael could've appreciated if he wasn't so GNOME 3 disappointed and not following any GNOME-related news source:

Treat Gnome3 as something new” by Allan Day

And to address the "dissapearing GNOME developers" claim, I will highlight another 2 short weekly reports:

1778 commits, in 207 projects, by 207 contributors in a week

1816 commits, in 178 projects, by 214 contributors for a week

both of which are from this month.

[jmartins]

I belive that now is the time to using E17. It's easy and not is memory pacman.

[spirtbrat]

Michael is not the one saying Gnome is loosing relevancy, the Gnome developer who wrote the blogpost is. Michael just happens to agree.

Of course he didn't wrote the "staring into the abyss" article. But he thought it is good opportunity to point out the Cinnamon and the Mate projects, as they are bringing those good old memories about the GNOME 2.0 desktop.

There are more of his thoughts, likings and opinions. Like those for example:

"The negativity towards the GNOME project isn't surprising since the botched GNOME 3.0 release."

"Prior to reading Otte's GNOME abyss blog post last night, I myself was thinking of what desktop environment to use next. For nearly two years my main production desktop has been Ubuntu 10.10 with GNOME 2.32 virtualized within Mac OS X on an Apple MacBook Pro. With my new retina MacBook Pro, it's time to move past Ubuntu 10.10 and the most pressing problem has been missing GNOME2."


Every interactive application - being either console or graphical one - is enforcing a certain way of work flow. A way that the developers thought it may be the best one for this king of activity. Take for example the once hugely vibrant competition between Vim and Emacs - two overpowered text editors with very different manner of achieving the same goals.
Also the various console mail clients.
Or even the numerous Unix (-like) kernels at the time when they were not so different from one another.
The thing that made them distinguishable were their philosophy which explains their different way of achieving same common goals.

GNOME 3 _is_ different and it is different for a reason. You _cannot_ work the same way, like you did with every graphical interface since Win95. If you need to use your old work flow for whatever reason (no time to figure out how to be as productive with the new tool, no appreciation of the benefits it brings you, or just plain stubbornness), then you _have to_ chose another graphical environment. Here is a recent interview that Michael could've appreciated if he wasn't so GNOME 3 disappointed and not following any GNOME-related news source:

Treat Gnome3 as something new” by Allan Day

And to address the "disappearing GNOME developers" claim, I will highlight another 2 short weekly reports:

1778 commits, in 207 projects, by 207 contributors in a week

1816 commits, in 178 projects, by 214 contributors for a week

both of which are from this month.

[spirtbrat]

Michael is not the one saying Gnome is loosing relevancy, the Gnome developer who wrote the blogpost is. Michael just happens to agree.

Of course he didn't wrote the "staring into the abyss" article. But he thought it is good opportunity to point out the Cinnamon and the Mate projects, as they are bringing those good old memories about the GNOME 2.0 desktop.

There are more of his thoughts, likings and opinions. Like those for example:

"The negativity towards the GNOME project isn't surprising since the botched GNOME 3.0 release."

"Prior to reading Otte's GNOME abyss blog post last night, I myself was thinking of what desktop environment to use next. For nearly two years my main production desktop has been Ubuntu 10.10 with GNOME 2.32 virtualized within Mac OS X on an Apple MacBook Pro. With my new retina MacBook Pro, it's time to move past Ubuntu 10.10 and the most pressing problem has been missing GNOME2."


Every interactive application - being either console or graphical one - is enforcing a certain way of work flow. A way that the developers thought it may be the best one for this king of activity. Take for example the once hugely vibrant competition between Vim and Emacs - two overpowered text editors with very different manner of achieving the same goals.
Also the various console mail clients.
Or even the numerous Unix (-like) kernels at the time when they were not so different from one another.
The thing that made them distinguishable were their philosophy which explains their different way of achieving same common goals.

GNOME 3 _is_ different and it is different for a reason. You _cannot_ work the same way, like you did with every graphical interface since Win95. If you need to use your old work flow for whatever reason (no time to figure out how to be as productive with the new tool, no appreciation of the benefits it brings you, or just plain stubbornness), then you _have to_ chose another graphical environment. Here is a recent interview that Michael could've appreciated if he wasn't so GNOME 3 disappointed and not following any GNOME-related news source:

Treat Gnome3 as something new” by Allan Day

And to address the "disappearing GNOME developers" claim, I will highlight another 2 short weekly reports:

1778 commits, in 207 projects, by 207 contributors in a week

1816 commits, in 178 projects, by 214 contributors for a week

both of which are from this month.

[fewt]

What memories? I'm still using it. I also use Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit version and I'm not going anywhere from here until I will find a distribution with updated kernel and Gnome 2.32. Long live Gnome 2. For me Gnome 3 is the worst desktop environment I have ever test. I had to search on Google to find the Shutdown button. WTF?

You are in luck, I happen to know of such a distribution. I call it Fuduntu (http://www.fuduntu.org).