The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists
theregister.com
theregister.com
Personally I would have preferred matrix/element but hey Discourse>mailing lists for me.
Seems like there will be a Matrix bridge; FTA:
> GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator Andrea Veri [...]
> [...] also mentioned reducing fragmentation of the GNOME communities, along with improved integration, such as a bridge to Matrix for live chat. The move is part of a general modernization of the GNOME Project's infrastructure, which has also seen a move from IRC to Matrix and from cgit to GitLab.
The inability to fix it is an indicator of a cultural/organizational problem.
gnome 2 was the truth. im curious if id still be running gui's today if gnome didnt crap the bed so bad, im mainly in tmux now.
I'm glad somebody made a UI that actually works in both form factors. All that's missing is a swipe keyboard.
Modern GNOME 3 is finally a good UX on Linux.
But it's worth acknowledging that it's also possible that a large number of people simply disagree with you and actively choose it on its own merits.
Especially now where most of stuff you do is "switch between few full screen apps" so as long as access to the basics is not obstructed I'd imagine most users wouldn't care
No, people are not pissed off by the radicality of the choices. Stop taking people for uneducated jokers. People are pissed off because they understand the choices and do not agree with them or what they imply. Gamification, pushing apps and app stores, using the same disempowering concepts as mobile plateforms, changing design every so often for no good reason, focusing on simple design over features to the extreme which is again disempowering users, disregarding high performance requirements or assumptions such as recent hardware, stop pushing touchscreens. Nobody is arguing against having clean and accessible design for newcomers and nobody is saying that all of gnome is bad. It's just the same kind of critics that happen against wikimedia foundation or against mozilla: it is addressed to the management and the people that control the marketing and reads basically: cut the crap, stop doing futile stuff, your core things are good but they have been in better shape and would need more actual useful work, your goal is not only low entry barrier but also and very importantly high ceiling, if you target entry users your goal is to educate and teach. Also you are not a product (which needs to succeed and keep growing) but a tool, for users, by users, which solves a given goal and will be irrelevant when this goal becomes irrelevant, and that's ok.
But if your current setup works painlessly for you then keep using that.
That's not really a thing if you're on a stable distribution. That's the entire point with going with distributions that do periodic releases rather than rolling releases - you benefit from testing others have done before you.
I think it's great that a few open source projects are willing to be more radical and experimental, even if that results in pissing off a large number of reasonable and well-educated people.
The alternative seems to be a kind of milquetoast design-by-committee that satisfies the majority of people but also perpetually plays catch up to proprietary products by recreating their features without ever breaking new ground.
How is this not a description of gnome? I specifically argue this is my previous comment. In contrast to say plasma/xfce/lxqt which are mostly an idealized windows xp in terms of concepts, ie a frozen target, not playing catch-up.
> I did not interpret "radical" in the prior comment to have either a positive or negative connotation.
Neither do i. :)
> It merely implies that some of GNOME's decisions are polarizing and a drastic departure from norms, [..]
> I think it's great that a few open source projects are willing to be more radical and experimental [..]
This is not true, they are following quite closely the most recent trends in design. Specifically mobile platforms and quite apple-like: round squares, low-contrast thin-outlines, switch-style toggles, dock and launchpad-style app selector, simple window decoration, hamburgers, ... And this is a well-known choice, which has a history, motivations, requisites, etc. And surprise! the critics made at gnome are kind of the same (with a lower intensity) that are maid at apple or at mobile walled gardens: being dumbed-down, hiding OS concepts, discouraging any customization.
I'm really not very angry at gnome. It's fine to do this design style. I don't use it but not because of the look, in fact i like some apps they do. They just need to understand better how and why the thing they are inspired by has been maid and pay attention the the stuff that they should not reproduce, either because it doesn't make any sense in their case or because it's bad for the users.
> They have a vision and stick to it for years. I'm happy they don't just feel offended by posts like yours and act like short term pleasers.
If your design decisions are so bad there are multiple projects that migrate off you or stick to the old version (hell, GIMP is still stuck at GTKv2 IIRC, with GTKv3 slowly getting there) then your "vision" might not be that great. Honestly GNOME is there because of inertia more than quality of the changes.
> Personally I would have preferred matrix/element but hey Discourse>mailing lists for me.
The interaction for randoms is much easier but I hate how much space it wastes. I wish there was "my desktop is not phone" default theme there...
In other news, if you use green paint, it'll paint things green.
The XFCE folks are welcome to fork GTK to support their own use cases.
Did you know that GTK was a cross platform tookit, even on Windows and Mac OS? Andf you did not had to install GNOME on Windows to use a GTK app, because it was a tooklit for making apps, and GNOME was a project that combine GTK apps, and a window manager to make a DE.
Many apps ported to Qt so I don't think there is a chance that GTK will get a viable fork, Qt will be the only cross platform toolkit
I have heard this explanation before for why GNOME is so popular despite the fact that so many people vocally dislike it. It's certainly possible, but I find it implausible.
For one thing, this would imply that we see a slow downward trend in GNOME usage which does not seem to be the case. For another thing, Linux users in particular seem less likely than most to just "go with what everyone else uses" since that would mean not using Linux in the first place. Finally, it doesn't seem like Linux desktop environments have enough of a moat to create serious inertia, at least not compared to things like mobile operating systems. Programs written for one Linux desktop environments typically work with only minor aesthetic issues in others, so that should not be a major impediment to distro-hopping.
I think it's worth considering an alternative hypothesis, that many people have evaluated multiple options and legitimately prefer GNOME to the alternatives on intrinsic merits such as design, stability, extensions, etc. I would also find it plausible that some of its popularity is due to many popular distributions choosing it as their default, but then the question is why those distributions do so, and again the most plausible explanation to me is that they are making the decision for pragmatic rather than legacy reasons.
It's also a default for few prominent Linux distributions. Ubuntu, Debian and the Red Hat variants all come with GNOME since forever (aside the Ubuntu's Unity endeavour
> I think it's worth considering an alternative hypothesis, that many people have evaluated multiple options and legitimately prefer GNOME to the alternatives on intrinsic merits such as design, stability, extensions, etc.
Or that just most people use GNOME so distros pick it as default and so most people use GNOME.
Why most people use bash while it can be argued that zsh is wholly better replacement ?
Also "better" doesn't matter if improvement is small enough that it doesn't improve your workflow, or small enough that it is not worth the effort to re-learn everything.
GNOME isn't really "bad" as much as "a bunch of developers changing shit that worked just fine for mostly imaginary gains (or just plain old "generating work to stay employed")", which just pisses off people that were entirely fine with it and now got a bunch of annoyances to re-learn after updating their machines.
> For another thing, Linux users in particular seem less likely than most to just "go with what everyone else uses" since that would mean not using Linux in the first place.
Right but the fact it's higher on average doesn't mean that on average majority will still just use Ubuntu with whatever default DE it is coming with.
> Programs written for one Linux desktop environments typically work with only minor aesthetic issues in others, so that should not be a major impediment to distro-hopping.
I mean I use i3 and it has been a bit of a PITA to have both KDE and GNOME side to not look shit (especially with dark theme... altho that part became a bit easier) without installing the entirety of both environments just to change settings, so dunno about that.
With emails you can have your own UI in your own desktop, a thing only very few know nowadays and even less know how powerful and free it is. Sometimes people see in-Emacs presentations and say "that's like magic", it's just the classic desktop model vs the modern ex-IBM crappy model.
And people did, twice! Some distros are offered in two main variants: a fork of Gnome 2, and a fork of Gnome 3. I believe this should give Gnome developers some food for thought.
Discourse is centralized, moderators delete messages, rename and manipulate threads. The inner circle has all the power. Upvotes induce groupthink and cliques.
Technically there are git based issue trackers and code review systems but that's unrelated note
- CI integration
- Rich markup, for images etc.
- Simple patch management
- Edits to messages
- Issue tracking
Rich markup: you can use HTML in mail. I think it's silly, but you can do that.
Simple patch management: that's what version control systems are for; if your vcs doesn't support email, you can't do that. If it does, you can.
Edits to messages: you mean altering the past? That's a terrible idea.
Issue tracking: that's what bug trackers are for. You add a link to the bug number, or, more likely, you send a mail message to the bug tracker's email interface and get a bug number back. Send more email with the bug number in the subject and it gets added as a comment to the bug.
Compared to that any fancy service provides lock-in under thin veil of "friendly interface".
Now, there are strengths too. Like being archived easily & having threaded conversations integrated.
Pulling local trees has been absolutely better IMO with mailing list. I can literally with single keybinding apply patch to relevant repo, something that takes much longer route with Github. (convert URL to raw.github/whatever, copy and paste to apply, or do clicky-clicky in the Github app or whathaveyou)
Oh no, they are not. I loathe projects that only do mailing list support, because that means I have to subscribe to the mailing list, create a new folder and filter rule so that the mailing list doesn't flood my inbox with stuff I don't care about, and once the problem is solved, leave the mailing list, remove the filter and folder.
In contrast, issues on GitHub/GitLab or public self-hosted GitLab instances only require me signing up once (and in most cases via some form of SSO), I can add attachments such as screenshots or detailed logs that would just blow through the ridiculous size caps on mails, and I only get notifications on topics I explicitly subscribe for.
That's a workflow problem on your side. Why is it so hard? Maybe your mail user agent isn't configurable?
"In contrast,"... "me"... "I"... "I"... "I"...
Every one of your proposed advantages are not about the community's health, but about your convenience and ability to ignore the community as a whole.
It's fine that you have a preference, but claiming that your preference is more democratic is incorrect.
What makes a ML based workflow better for a community?
> It's fine that you have a preference, but claiming that your preference is more democratic is incorrect.
Most development is not done over MLs, that's a fact. The percentage of ML-based development done over time is shrinking. So I'd say the democratic vote is not one in favour of MLs.
You were talking about MLs being more barrier-free than "friendly interfaces". I showed why that is not the case. The effort required for dealing with MLs is way higher.
Anti-spam measures are a large part of what made using MLs so annoying. From a moderation side, MLs are more work for that reason as well - Github and Gitlab at least get rid of spambots shilling shady cryptocurrencies, weenie enlargeners or questionable quality designer drugs. With MLs, all of this ends up in your moderation queue as well.
All the relevant mailing lists for my interest projects have web interface/archive, I can selectively reply/participate in any or no ongoing threads, and stop at any time.
This is the same as saying we should only ever do open source development on closed proprietary platforms which only exist and allow access on the whim of a single entity which responds to no one.
As opposed to communicating over a completely open, decentralized and inherently free protocol.
GNOME is a parody of itself.
Why be hostile to Gnome when they're far from the first to dump mailman, and far from the first to use Discourse?
Mailing lists are hard not much because mails layer too many tech but because people do not know them anymore due to the big push toward web crapplications, a push choosed for commercial purposes. As a result instead of being on a decentralized infra we end up in centralized ones, get too much overhead than switch to some giant cloud services.
Unfortunately it's not only "generic people" (CL/UL in the Simon's BOFH tails terms) but also technicians who tend "in crowd" to behave as any other "crowd" by Gustave Le Bon...
I don't understand the issue with it. Badges, achievements, progress dashboards, etc. are mostly fine, and have been around for decades in multiple flavours and platforms.
Plus many OS devs resigned on providing unpaid customer support. So far Github issues seems to be a good place for relevant bug reports. And people who need help (and paid) have direct phone number.