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Comment by nullspace | Hacker News Reader

I get annoyed when I see posts like this with revisionist history.

I can't comment on everything but:

> Unity (abandoned)

You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for Gnome 3 to catch up.

> snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :).

I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist when snap was announced. Or it was around the same time.

Given the above two, I'd place very little credence on the rest of your points. I agree with the Mir situation to some extent, but look at how long wayland has taken to ship.

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> You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially

I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop manager: the paradigm. Dis-functional effects imposed to the user for no reason. And in a context which replaced functions with minimalism.

I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time, I thought it must had been literally a stroke.

> I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time

Power users have privilege and need to be hobbled; their complaints ignored. The needs of users with the least privilege, the computer illiterate, should be prioritized.

Or something like that.

The general sentiment I see is that if a feature is only used effectively by a small handful of users then it's probably going to risk getting removed. That's just numbers, it doesn't make a difference whether it's "power users" or any other users. Either way maintainer time is limited and sometimes they have to make a decision to drop a feature that isn't pulling its weight.

But I've also never heard any description of the phrase "power user" that was clearly defined. Wikipedia says:

"A power user is a user of computers ... who uses advanced features"

"In enterprise software systems, 'Power User' may be a formal role given to an individual who is not a programmer, but who is a specialist in business software"

So which advanced features and which business software are we talking about here? That could be anything really.

> if a feature is only used effectively by a small handful of users

We do automated computing to have tools in general, as we may need them; and we use special features when we need them.

Figure imagemagick discriminating options or functions the same way ("Lanczos stays in, but we could ditch Hamming").

Those special features all have a maintenance cost, and if no one is around to pay it then their usefulness will diminish until they reach the threshold where it's not worth it anymore. Not sure why any filtering algorithm would be considered out of the ordinary. Do you know how many scientific and mathematics packages I've seen that are are really old, outdated, and suffering bitrot? Quite a few. In fact that seems to be a field where the old algorithms are discarded fairly regularly in favor of new ones. The older algorithms that remain popular do tend to stick around.

Then some mechanism of deprecation could be immensely better than removal (in software with tolerance - an image viewer or an audio editor are not the same as medical equipment firmware or banking software). It could also encourage the interested to review and update the code in case of need.

Some pieces of software are more free to grow, their value is in options (image processing), while others have value in their reliability (banking).

This said, one phenomenon that appeared in the "unfortunate decade" and which is extremely dubious is that of the propaganda that "less is more". No it is not. Freedom is "more". Constraints are "less". (In the general reality of desktop software applications.)

> there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable.

That's an accessibility option. GNOME Settings -> Accessibility -> Enable Animations; or `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false`. Should apply everywhere.

> org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations

Yes, but it does not disable the fades, nor all the gratuitous animations I see in the GUI of gnome-font-viewer (one of the very few pieces I can try not having uninstalled it). Those animations must have been hardcoded in the software, it must probably be recompiled - and I do not take it for granted they can be disabled through a configuration flag.

I just tried it and it disabled the fades. Maybe you made a typo in the setting? Most GNOME apps are not going to have animations hardcoded, they typically use standard widgets like GtkStack or GtkRevealer that handle the animations automatically and respect the system setting. You can verify this by opening the GTK inspector in Font Viewer.

> Maybe you made a typo in the setting

Before posting I tried `gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations` and it returns 'false', consistently (as it should) with `dconf-editor` used to see the options. And I verified (as I just re-did) the behaviour of `gnome-font-viewer`: changing the window content (switching the font) fades (messily) from former to latter, using the menu animates a "pull-down", activating the search slides down the interface...

I will try the GTK inspector today.

You are absolutely correct that Gnome 3.0 was bad. Even more importantly there isn't anything whatsoever inherently with going your own way. Doing so is ultimately how we end up with a useful marketplace of tools to pick from.

If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific sequence of development matters.

For what its worth I think they date from around the same time.

https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015

The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being universal it will probably never see substantial use outside Ubuntu.

It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.

> It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.

I have a feeling many of these decisions are driven by internal politics than proper analysis. The first question when you decide to go your own way is whether others will find this more useful than the competition. Build better tools is not sufficient if you don’t invest in evangelising and great branding.

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