Personally I would have preferred matrix/element but hey Discourse>mailing lists for me.
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.
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.
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.
But if your current setup works painlessly for you then keep using that.
> 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...
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.
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
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.
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
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.
The inability to fix it is an indicator of a cultural/organizational problem.
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.