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Fedora is getting ready to release its 18th major update and this time around it'll be notable for something unusual -- its the only GNOME distro stills standing.
What's wrong with Gnome
Linus's opinion, Intel guy
q:"I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3"
What happened to Gnome
This one is pretty easy, IOS happened. Remember back in 2008 when the idea of a radical GNOME rewrite was first floated (under the punny name ToPaZ)? Remember when the developers of GNOME said, no, let's not make a radical leap. Let's improve the underlying toolkits and revampt the GNOME environment, but let's leave the desktop alone. Incremental updates are the key to our success. Then the iPhone, iOS and the the iPad happened. The ripple effect of the iPad accounts for at least some of Gnome 3's decision to abandon its incremental plan and go for the radical rewrite that is GNOME 3.
Except that GNOME 3 failed to do the one thing that sets iOS apart from not just GNOME 3, but Windows 8 as well. iOS does not run on desktop computers.
Everyone is copying apple -- building tablet-style interfaces
The problem with GNOME is the same problem with Windows 8 -- too scared to fully commit
Too scared to fork off a separate tablet interface so then the developer thinks, I know,
I'll just build it so that we can write once, but run anywhere. Now you have only one problem, you've inevitably created a steaming pile of shit.
It's chasing tablets with an all-in-one desktop -- write once, run anywhere has a long history of sucking
Windows 8 is doing the same thing and failing as well. But at least Windows 8 has the good sense to fall back to an ordinary desktop
Abandoning the users you have to chase the one's you don't.
Gnome is like the prototypical romantic comedy lead that's chasing someone it can't have
while missing what's right in front of it -- user base. In romantic comedies the character
typically has an epiphany and recognizes what they had and all is right in the world.
With Gnome, thus far there has been no epiphany just a slow steady stream of distro's
dropping or forking the once might desktop. Ubuntu has moved on to Unity, Mint continues to pull in GNOME 3 refugees with Cinnamon.
Torvalds and others have jumped ship for XFCE, KDE, LXDE or countless other small desktops.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/75820.html
I wondered if you could do something for us in November: give me your
thoughts and observations on the state of Gnome, based on where the
desktop is in comparison to, say, Ubuntu and with Win 8 released (that
will have come out in Oct). Also, is the project really suffering some
kind of exodus and what does this mean for the future of Gnome, based
on your experiences?
'm not sure that's going to happen with GNOME 3.x. With KDE 4, I saw where they wanted to go, I just didn't think it was a great idea. With GNOME... I really don't know what they're trying to do. It looks to me like change just for the sake of change, and that's pointless.
Of course, it's one thing when just a technology journalist, like me, doesn't like what you're doing. But, when leading Linux developers dislike a desktop this much, and one major Linux distribution, Ubuntu, dislikes it so much that they decided to replace the GNOME 3 shell with an entirely different desktop approach, Unity, I think it's time for GNOME's developers to sit down and seriously consider whether they've should backtrack to the GNOME 2 architecture.
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