GNOME Is Losing Relevance On The Linux Desktop

[blackiwid]

ok I understand that people dont like it if something completely new is coming, because they used something like windows 95 style the last 20 years I get that, but why the hell do here 99% bitch around gnome-shell but bitch much less about unity?

unitys first version was way worse than gnome-shell was, it was unstable and has also very new paradigm that was close the gnome-shells, and today it has some advantages the hud thing seems to be nice but have much disadvantages still...

I can understand if you absolutly hate gnome-shell and unity, but loving unity and hating gnome-shell I cant understand. And why do you think that gnome-shell should be perfekt in version 3.4, was gnome 2.4 perfekt? no it wasnt. Is it a thing that gnome-devs dont hear what we want and we use Ubuntu so Ubuntu-devs cant be bad?

I can live with the unity and gnome-shell sucks at all guys but with the ones that hate gnome-shell but be ok with unity I can't or at least I dont understand that. I think thats just gnome-love-haters, they hate the devs but love gtk and other stuff like that...


arguing with absolutly uninteresting stuff that is "fixed" in 3.6 anyway like :

"GNOME 3, in my opinion, wasn't exactly user-friendly though.. when it seems to prefer hiding a lot of commonly used options, like the shutdown button for instance."

just get over your gnome-hate or do use something else... if you cant find any positive point in gnome 3 over gnome 2 hate it, then you most likely will also hate unity, but if you find 50-90% good stuff in it and hate 10% just install a few extentions or wait 1-2 versions... I think you all flame so much, to encurage the devs to do what you want... but its not constructive to hate-flame them to bring them to what you want to do, it does not work anyway mostly.

And be more open, that devs made some really good stuff you used gnome mostly for several years (or you stopped bitching around years ago anyway) so this devs cant be that stupid you think, so yes maybe they make some small mistakes here and there, but think first for one moment that you maybe could be the one that judge to fast.

So some guys bitch around the removing of nautilus tabs even they could not test it yet mostly. Instead of ohh I use that all 100 years one time so why would you remove that, think maybe they include a alternative that is better, maybe they tweak a bit the file folder opening of the gnome-shell if they would fix zeitgeist as example or integrate it more and 2 different folders would open better in seperate windows and maybe they change some other stuff as example with mid mouse or alt+enter a directory a new window of gnome pops up maybe thats more efficient.

I used this tab thing but very seldom and had to nearly force me to do it, it felt not very natural... so overthinking that is good, if they give you an good alterantive for that task I would be happy with it.

[liam]

Actually a quick sheet is good enough. Surprisingly, some people seems to be too lazy to read the cheatsheet being stuck on their own paradigms of 'mr know-all'. Younger generations are open to new tools. When reading some comments, the reason is to stay in Windows 95 metaphore because some of them grew with that concept. We, as users, are supposed to be desktop agnostic, I guess that notion has been lost a decade ago.

Ideally an interface should be self-teaching. To achieve that it needs to be consistent and very well considered (what are the minimum number of primitives that can be chained in order to achieve arbitrary actions). It isn't easy hence why interfaces have changed so little.
Gnome is looking to help a bit in this area by having a first boot experience that will explain how things work. That seems a good place to mention the primary shortcuts and using f12 to trigger the cheatsheet if they so choose.
BTW, i couldn't agree more about the importance of trying new approaches (whatever they might be).
When I first read the Gnome Shell design spec I had high hopes b/c it described a radically new way of working. Unfortunately whats been delivered has been a few good ideas (the overview and pervasive javascript) and lots of iterations of the first part of a dieter ram principle (make things as simple as possible...).

[anarki2]

You mentioned the retina display too few times.

Coz it's so relevant.

[pingufunkybeat]

I don't think that any of this really matters.

GNOME has always been about GTK and its C background. The Unix world loves C and Qt (which is C++ and some additional preprocessor) had additional problems due to the well-known early licensing woes. This made GTK + GObject the preferred way to write GUI applications for X (on Linux, BSD, etc.), and since GNOME is basically a bunch of technologies built around GTK, these apps looked native in a GNOME environment. Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, there are so many projects which don't have anything to do with GNOME, but which people mistake for GNOME apps. Because they use GTK.

Although KDE has always been technologically superior, and has always been ahead in terms of innovation (these are facts, if you doubt them, do some research), it doesn't seem to me that this is changing. GTK is still the more popular toolkit, and many GTK applications are increasingly dependent on GNOME technologies.

The fact that you change the Gnome Shell with some other desktop metaphor is IRRELEVANT. It's just a shell. It's like removing switching from bash to zsh and saying that GNU is not relevant. GNOME is still there, and it's still relevant. Ubuntu is still GNOME through and through, and show now signs of changing. RedHat is still all GNOME, and Debian defaults to it. How is it losing relevance?

Personally, I've used KDE since the 1.1 days and to me it has always been the most comprehensive desktop environment and set of libraries for application development on Linux. I've experimented with many things during the years, including E16, AfterStep, WindowMaker and GNOME, but always ended up going back because the real point behind KDE is its unified framework that gives all of its applications super powers -- like KIOslaves, like KHTML (now Webkit), like phonon, etc. The window manager and panel are irrelevant, and with a bit of tweaking, KWin and Plasma will do exactly what you want them to do. The industry push to standardise on and exclusively fund the development of GNOME is very unfortunate, IMHO.

[Alejandro Nova]

GNOME really needs to drop the NIH mentality, and to start working with KDE. Akonadi is the perfect replacement for E-D-S, but, somehow, they prefer to use an unmantained piece of software because "Akonadi is so slow"...

The "Akonadi and Nepomuk are slow and buggy" excuses work only while Akonadi and Nepomuk are slow and buggy. That's not the case anymore. KDE 4.9 not only earns the distinction of being the first KDE 4.x.0 without a serious Nepomuk fuckup, but actually does some tricks unknown to Windows and MacOS X. Press the "Videos" button in Dolphin and you get all your videos. Press the "Music" button and you have all your songs, regardless of their actual location. You can even sort them by Artist, or by Album. Press "Today" and you get the files you opened this day. Press "Last Month" and Dolphin will show you all files accessed last month, with nice auto-generated folders separating them by days. And they fixed nepomuksearch://, so, you can also have virtual folders again. And all this happens fast (~40 secs for 2,800 files totaling 2,9 GB, images)

While all that is happening in the Nepomuk world, KDE 4.10 is going to fully exploit Akonadi for the first time. KDE 4.9 upstreamed the Akonadi-Google experimental resource, meaning that you have Google Calendar, Contacts and Tasks working from day one and with no strange configuration needed (now you get a nice, web 2.0, Google login). And KDE 4.10 is going to do the same with Akonadi-Facebook and the new Akonadi-Microblog, meaning you'll have live Facebook status updates, live tweeting updates, and live synchronizing between your calendar and Facebook events from day one. All runs in the background, and needs less RAM than never before (I was amazed comparing the RAM usage of 4.9 versus 4.8, both with Akonadi and Nepomuk)

So, GNOME guys, this is a warning. The "Akonadi and Nepomuk are slow and buggy and they eat resources like there's no tomorrow" excuse is wearing thin. So you better do something, or the Akonadi + Nepomuk combo will pummel you into nonexistance sooner rather than later.

[Teho]

So you better do something, or the Akonadi + Nepomuk combo will pummel you into nonexistance sooner rather than later.

I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the Qt dependency and C++ language than anything. It's unfortunate but I doubt Gnome will ever use Akonadi or the Qt implementation of Nepomuk. Then again if the Gnome PIM stack rots there's a chance for these Qt apps to shine.

[bwat47]

It doesn't remember application filters after reboot and this is very annoying.

This is already fixed in 12.10 alpha 3

[fuzz]

I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the Qt dependency and C++ language than anything. It's unfortunate but I doubt Gnome will ever use Akonadi or the Qt implementation of Nepomuk. Then again if the Gnome PIM stack rots there's a chance for these Qt apps to shine.

Qt is my biggest issue with KDE.

I run a very few set of Qt programs (none of which are native to KDE) and it takes forever to update/compile all the Qt libs.

At least it supports gtkstyle.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Yea, gnome3 shell is really really really really awful,an epic fail for the open source community . So far i liked a lot Unity from ubuntu 12.04, but i still use kde4 because it feels more professional, mature and useful .

[uid313]

Gnome 3 Fallback Mode is basically Gnome 2 ported to GTK 3 with some bugfixes:
http://www.vuntz.net/journal/post/20...e-gnome-panel!

No, not really, lots of other things changed too, like the control panel and stuff.
I am sure MATE would have appreciated an interim GNOME 2 release based upon GTK 3.

Yeah, GNOME 3 Fallback Mode (gnome-session-classic which use gnome-panel) is what I use.
GNOME 3 with gnome-session-classic is great!