Comment by opminion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opminion | Hacker News Reader

Two golden quotes from a Gnome dev. Beware, they are taken out of context:

I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app

and

for the first time we may have ability to really shape the user experience and form an identity for the GNOME platform

Why would the windows manager be a "brand", rather than the distribution? (Red Hat, Ubuntu).

There is no point (for them) in people "recognising the install" if they don't have easy access to it.

Having wasted enough time configuring appearance, I now would be in one of two scenarios:

1. Install a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Red Hat and then use whatever comes as a default (and avoid fiddling around to save my time for more important things). Won't use Gnome if it is not the default.

2. Install whatever allows me to use the same appearance as in the other machines. SuSE/KDE used to have a "Redmond" theme that looked and behaved like Windows Classic. Do the same in the Windows machines.

> Why would the windows manager be a "brand", rather than the distribution? (Red Hat, Ubuntu).

GNOME is not a window manager though. The (default) WM in gnome has been sawfish, metacity, and currently mutter. Various components come and go, but the umbrella that is gnome stays, and the brand it has is pretty much the only defining attribute of it.

> Two golden quotes from a Gnome dev.

That's not a Gnome dev that's William Jon McCann, the main Gnome 3 designer. That McCann claims ignorance of XFCE without shame is pretty shocking.

Pretty sure he is more than just a designer. He's the mastermind behind consolekit (now abandoned I guess in favor of logind or some such from systemd).

He's also the fellow who brought us gnome-screensaver, which gave a hint of what was to come. It didn't just take away options, it did them under the theory that the user is evil and will do evil things if allowed to set screensaver options. (See https://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuest...)

Who gets the blame for the rest of the *kit concept and undocumented setup. Glad to see this stuff going, I could never figure out how to use it. Nothing had usable or meaningful man pages.

> Why would the windows manager be a "brand", rather than the distribution? (Red Hat, Ubuntu). But GNOME developers are not content with being just a middle man that distributions tear apart to take what they want. That's why they are burning a lot of cycles on making GNOME into an OS by itself.

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