Hacker News Reader

Comment by dyingkneepad | Hacker News Reader

Gnome 2 was a very shiny and polished desktop environment. Its death (in favor of Gnome 3) meant a lot of people who contributed to it (e.g., me) got fragmented into Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce and others. I wonder what would have happened if Gnome was still a usable thing and this massive migration out of it was not necessary. Would we have fought over some other problem and forked regardless? Would we all have worked together to make it even more awersome?

It also saddens me that Red Hat insists on dumping its money in Gnome 3. I would love if they were putting their resources in improving something I actually use :).

View on HN

It didn't die; somehow it changed direction hard enough to lose significant developer capacity.

I liken it to the total failure of the Flickr rewrite. Flickr could have been Facebook!

So... How did that happen? Who was responsible for setting Gnome dev back by half a decade?

I still hold that they should’ve renamed GNOME 3 something other than GNOME and let each develop as their own things. I feel like that method would’ve hemorrhaged fewer developers. Clearly there was some sort of closed meeting at Redhat with the few people that inherited leadership of GNOME deciding on the complete overhaul; it wasn’t a democratic process.

GNOME 3 is performing well enough now that I have moved over to it. At its introduction, though, it forced compositing, and drivers were not ready. That coupled with the massive UI changes gave users good reasons to complain.

It cannot run on most ARM SBCs; I can't run it with any reasonable consistent responsiveness on any but my newest PC. Gnome 3 is _still_ a pig; and utterly useless to most of the world which still operates on half decade or decade old PCs.

It's a prime example of privileged western developers overlooking the needs of their users.

I live in a Western country and Gnome3 is still a pig on low end 4GB RAM based machines. Budgie is much faster.

Gnome 3 is perfectly usable IMO, I use it every day.

The initial release was pretty bad, but it's gotten much better over the years.

Well, that is your opinion.

In my world, extensions are required (at the very least, dash-to-dock). But extensions are a second class citizen and often stop working after an apt-get update.

And Gnome forces my machine into heavy swapping. Cinnamon (which is almost the same thing, but usable) doesn't cause swapping.

I don't find dash to dock necessary at all. I just hit super key and type, or use the 3 finger pinch touchpad gesture to open the overview.

In any case, in my experience extensions aren't as brittle as you're implying, they generally only stop working after a major gnome version update (e.g. 3.32 > 3.34) which you wouldn't get through an apt-get update.

I haven't had any swapping issues at all, but I suppose this could be hardware dependent (e.g. nvidia drivers are known to cause serious memory leaks with mutter)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com