Comment by cuddlybacon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cuddlybacon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree MS is probably being scapegoated here. I was using Linux around this time and I don't remember hearing about this threat either.

> At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity.

But I don't agree with this.

I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of.

I used Gnome 2 at the time, but I also changed a lot. It's been a decade, so forgive me for forgetting most of the specific app names but: I used compiz then later beryl. I replaced the bottom bar with a dock. I removed the application launcher and instead used the dock plus a Spotlight clone. I switched apps with the Expose plugin provided by compiz/beryl. My top panel had a clock, system tray, and I don't think anything else.

We were definitely loud, but maybe also a minority. Threads, blogs, newsites, etc constantly had discussion on new apps you could use to mod your Linux (mostly Gnome) desktop experience. I remember cycling thru several docks and several spotlight clones within a couple years. The people behind Gnome 3 and Unity very well could have seen all that buzz as an indicator that this is what people really wanted. So that's what they built.

But in retrospect saying that you find the defaults fine and there isn't a real need to change them doesn't make for a very interesting blog post. So the people who were just fine with Gnome 2 didn't get heard until Gnome 2 was gone.

I've also little doubt that Compiz/Beryl/Fusion envy was a major motivating factor for starting GNOME3 etc. Compiz gave desktop Linux a massive boost in popularity. Prior to this desktop rendering was primarily CPU bound and did not use compositing. If these projects were born from compiz-envy, then it was for the right reasons, and maybe they could've done a good job.

But then shortly after came the iPhone, and the developers felt like they had to copy design cues from Apple. It was no longer just about improving desktop rendering and enabling new kinds of visuals. They wanted a combined workspace for the desktop and phone, and they wanted a "pattern language" like Apple, so they limited the ways in which users could tinker with their tools, aiming towards uniformity. The GNOME3 designers/developers in particular had a very pretentious attitude and ignored complaints.

It might not have been so bad if they had succeeded right away, but the earliest releases of GNOME3 and KDE4 were heavily bug-ridden. The whole desktop would crash, or come out with strange glitches. Sometimes you would lose your desktop configuration and had to start from scratch. People who were using Linux for real work would have to revert back to something more stable, and the newer desktops had already left a sour taste.

None of this had anything to do with Microsoft.

> I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of.

Having seen this type of thing play out in several industries including other open source projects, it would have been more like follow the competition I would say.

Users sometimes get listened to. Often times that's only to retroactively justify decisions that already got made.

What gets attention is competition. Incumbents are watched like hawks by everyone for obvious reasons. And the incumbents themselves are paranoid of newcomers or new ideas.

I worked in software at a company that developed CPUs. "Intel is doing this" or "Intel is adding that instruction" was the quickest and easiest way to get the attention of CPU designers. Not "our customers want this" or "that instruction will speed up this software our customers run". Those things would be considered, but you would have to do a lot of work, modelling, and justification before they'd look at it.

There's actually good reasons for this. Intel having done something, you could assume they had already done that justification work. Them deploying it meant customers would become familiar with it and accept using it (or even expect to be able to use it). So it's not necessarily stupid or lazy to put a lot of weight on what competition is doing, it can be very efficient.

You can get into these death spirals of the blind leading the blind when everybody starts fixating on something if you're not careful, though. I'd say this is what happened with everybody trying to shoehorn smartphone UIs into the desktop back then.

GNOME 2 was my bread and butter. It's absolutely my perception that GNOME devs have gone "drunk on popularity" at the time (or perhaps more precisely, drunk on power), and still are.

GNOME 3 would absolutely have not been pushed as the future of GNOME so unilaterally if the lead devs showed any restraint or signs of listening to their users, given how much initial outcry there was. Given that they announced they may be dropping X11 support in GTK5 (!) [1], I argue they are still drunk to one extent or another. X11 is the GUI server that most desktop Linux users use as of 2022! Have an ounce of respect for your users, and at least ask if that's what people want / are comfortable dropping.

I get it, it's their project. But if a good chunk of the Linux userbase uses your software, then it's good to at least ask if people are OK with the direction being taken.

[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/05/gtk_5_might_drop_x11/

>GNOME 3 would absolutely have not been pushed as the future of GNOME so unilaterally if the lead devs showed any restraint or signs of listening to their users, given how much initial outcry there was

I really doubt that. MATE exists as a continuation of GNOME 2 and it is just not very popular. The users who care about such things seem to be a very small minority.

>X11 is the GUI server that most desktop Linux users use as of 2022!

This is not the issue. The issue is the number of developers who are interested in working on the X11 support in GTK is shrinking. If there are no developers to actually work on it then it simply cannot be done, what the users use is not relevant anymore.

>Have an ounce of respect for your users, and at least ask if that's what people want / are comfortable dropping.

>if a good chunk of the Linux userbase uses your software, then it's good to at least ask if people are OK with the direction being taken.

There is no point to asking this. If you ask most users whether they want you to continue doing free work for them indefinitely, of course they will probably say yes. There is a contingent who never wants anything to become deprecated just out of principle.

Ironically there's someone linking[1] today to someone with basically the same complaints about how Firefox has less customisation dialogs than it used to.

They literally post screenshots[2] showing less options (eg, the "Close it when downloads are finished" checkbox has gone! Oh no!!).

I was thinking exactly what you've posted here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258822

[2] https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/mozilla.html#historyof...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com