GNOME Is Losing Relevance On The Linux Desktop

[ShadowBane]

why use a gpu to do mundane tasks such as posting on a forum? I don't always use modern hardware its true however all this compositing is little more than Yet Another Amusing Misuse Of Resources - please i really would love to see one instance of compositing providing me ( as the end user ) with an advantage over a standard WM

I keep seeing this or variants of it from those complaining about modern desktops. Using the GPU for the window manager actually makes your computer more efficient by reducing the processor load (face it, your Graphics Processing Unit is better suited to processing graphics than your CPU is) This can lead to both power saving (My GPU can run KWin on the lowest power setting without bumping up higher) as well as freeing up CPU time for other processes. In addition, most modern window managers can undirect full windows meaning that for running stuff like games there is literally zero GPU overhead.

[Jeff Halverson]

every project face a lot of problems in front. highlignting and brainstorming helps to solve them.

Except that brainstorming has been proven over and over in scientific studies to not be an effective strategy for anything. It was a marketing scheme set up by one of the leaders of early advertising industry. It is amazing that people still talk like brainstorming is effective at anything.

[ninez]

0) I don't care about sales

you may not care about sales, but the market does matter significantly over your personal opinion.

1) I enjoy a reasonably fast connection. Fast connection to the internet is inevitable and will come to all - it's in everyone's interest.

many areas (all over the world, including in 1st world countries) don't have fast connections (in all areas, especially in rural areas), nor the infrastructure in place to support it... it may take years and years for this to change for a great many people. you may have a fast internet connection, but millions and millions (and millions) of people do not. So regardless of whether or not you 'enjoy' a fast internet or whether or not it is in everyone's 'best interest', really doesn't say much at all.

2) If you have anything to do with the web, you've given up your privacy.

Some people sacrifice privacy more than others. Some people do use various methods of security (hardening locally to online stuff like VPN services, TOR, etc). Some people don't participate in social networking and block trackers (and other malicious stuff) using various techniques, etc, etc. I actually find it really sad that people like yourself bring up this point and seemingly have no issues with the lack of privacy online and just accept it as being okay and then rationalize that it's justified. (im guessing) You probably wouldn't like the police / your government installing Surveillance equipment in your home, so why do you cynically accept them doing so online?!

I for one am not interested in hosting all of my data (from work or home) on the web - the instant i do that - it is no longer your data, but instead it belongs to those you are giving it to for safe keeping... The company i work for also would NEVER in a million years want to host their data onlin, either.... I also am not interested in letting google probe unassigned tcp/udp ports on my machines or any other person/company that believes they have a right to try to access my machines or sell my personal information... it would seem you actually like the idea of people having no privacy online, as if being monitored by the thought police is a good thing...

As I've intimated, I'm a hard-core, 100% (no Windows or Apple at all) linux devotee for the past 10 years. To me, the cloud is the future and there is enough of it now to compel me. Chrome OS is now mature enough to deliver a simply excellent computing experience for the vast majority of what I do (excepting the Google App Engine thing which I've personally cloudified). Linux for me survives as server technologies (accessible via SSH app), Ubuntu One cloud storage (accessible via Google apps) and the Google Drive infrastructure (all based on linux, still no linux native app unfortunately).

For your needs the cloud may be just fine, but for some of us - that is not realistic AT ALL. it sounds like everything you do is lite, in terms of hardware requirements. In fact, it sounds like you could own the crappiest slowest netbook and be perfectly happy with that. The future of computing is not the cloud. The cloud will only be a part of it (ie: a single component) for some tasks having raw performance on local hardware using native applications will continue to be the way to get things done.

Myself, I use very few cloud services and maybe 2-3 online apps. But the reality is that the vast majority of applications that i use are native, with no sign of that changing in the foreseeable future.

[D0pamine]

I keep seeing this or variants of it from those complaining about modern desktops. Using the GPU for the window manager actually makes your computer more efficient by reducing the processor load (face it, your Graphics Processing Unit is better suited to processing graphics than your CPU is) This can lead to both power saving (My GPU can run KWin on the lowest power setting without bumping up higher) as well as freeing up CPU time for other processes. In addition, most modern window managers can undirect full windows meaning that for running stuff like games there is literally zero GPU overhead.

doesn't that depend on the gpu driver being 100% functional and bug free? its just something else to break...

lets say i've got a nvidia card but an aversion to using the blob what do i use? the nouveau driver? last time i tried with gnome-shell it failed miserably ( yes it worked but was very jerky and made the effects into a joke )

by all means have compositing but do not make it the default

[SunnyDrake]

2 ExpectOpenBrace and others
You will be really impressed how much apps can be used in cloud (check jolicloud distro).
there is PHP(read web)-GTK/flash/jquery-ui and other stuff to use DE from directly from web pages.
I could definitively say that web based apps is really future as it's provide almost no hw restricted(at least now,except broken WebGL), easy deployed, easy coded(doh i could see another monkey spike in algorithms/parts complexity for companies to provide not easily copied products),easy interconnected/load-balanced apps.
ChromeOS... well am yet to see powerfull firefox/opera or even android like market.. microsoft failed
It's hottime for firefox plugin/flash developers... somebody must raise market price for dev works
Sun...sun first company i saw provided cloud like services was amazon
investing a bunch of money in UI developement? great idea.. but worthless compared to fully flexible UI(that what was really snatched me from m$ platform )... You know big companies develop stuff, small companies customize it to tasks.. there is really no "best ever from box(shoot iOS guys.. they just obsessed with round edges)".. only tuned for specific case.. and statistically middle.

[ShadowBane]

doesn't that depend on the gpu driver being 100% functional and bug free? its just something else to break...

lets say i've got a nvidia card but an aversion to using the blob what do i use? the nouveau driver? last time i tried with gnome-shell it failed miserably ( yes it worked but was very jerky and made the effects into a joke )

by all means have compositing but do not make it the default

So, they should make the default experience worse because some users don't want to use a working driver? Honestly, KDE's approach is probably the best: it detects what you are running and if you have a known broken driver or stuff is failing too hard it drops to non-compositing mode, otherwise compositing (with modest effects and most of the bling disabled) by default.

[ninez]

by all means have compositing but do not make it the default

too late, no sense in crying over spilled milk but seriously, Gnome only 'defaults' GS if your H/W + driver supports it and if it 'seems' to support it (ie: logs into GS) but doesn't work well, it takes literally a few seconds to change to fallback.

Do you think it makes more sense to cater the 'defaults' to a minority, or is it better to cater to the majority while giving the minority the option to opt-out???

...i tend to think the latter is far more logical, but i get the impression you think the former is infinitely more important (which i think is silly!).

[D0pamine]

So, they should make the default experience worse because some users don't want to use a working driver? Honestly, KDE's approach is probably the best: it detects what you are running and if you have a known broken driver or stuff is failing too hard it drops to non-compositing mode, otherwise compositing (with modest effects and most of the bling disabled) by default.

IMO openbox is pretty enough so i'll use that, its a real shame though because gnome2 was/is the consummate DE and the garbled monstrosity that proposes to replace it is a lesson to all FSF developers - don't listen to ubuntu using fools with an opinion

[ownagefool]

Shame theres so many gtk based de's; with gnome dying*, one would have hoped that would have ended the great Qt / gtk debate.

*OK its not dying, but I don't understand why developers want to hijack a desktop environment and turn it into a phone OS or something Why not fork and rename to phone edition? Why force changes on a perfectly usable user interface? Meh, maybe they'll get there in the end, I wish them all the best, but they've turned me off in the mean time.

[johnc]

Shame theres so many gtk based de's; with gnome dying*, one would have hoped that would have ended the great Qt / gtk debate.

*OK its not dying, but I don't understand why developers want to hijack a desktop environment and turn it into a phone OS or something Why not fork and rename to phone edition? Why force changes on a perfectly usable user interface? Meh, maybe they'll get there in the end, I wish them all the best, but they've turned me off in the mean time.

It's mostly arrogance. It's, "Wow let's do something that seems personally exciting, and who cares what users want." But that mentality has been in GNOME for a long time now.

Meh, who cares. Something better will come up and they'll fall away into obscurity.