Nobody cares...

Story: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway markTotal Replies: 12
Author Content
cmost

Jan 26, 2013
10:19 AM EDT
It boggles the minds that the Gnome developers keep toiling away at the disaster that Gnome 3.x has become as if what they're doing is wanted or appreciated. It's obvious from the myriad forks of Gnome Shell (Unity, Cinnamon, Consortium) and the blatant fork of Gnome 2.2x (MATE) that has occurred in the wake of Gnome 3.x's debut that Gnome is in complete chaos and fumbling around in the dark. Instead of rallying the community, we now have fragmentation that will take years to straighten out and will no doubt introduce ever more confusion to lay persons trying out Linux for the first time. Way to go Gnome devs., great job! If a new Gnome is released and nobody is there to use it, does it make any noise?
Koriel

Jan 26, 2013
10:35 AM EDT
Never mind the the lay person, im seriously considering giving up on Linux due to the state of the desktop and I have been a Linux user since Slackware 2.

As quite frankly im fed up having to test and develop for an entire plethora of desktops and in some cases distros it was liveable up until this mess when I only really had gnome 2 and kde to worry about.

As I see it I have only a couple of options, find out which is the most popular desktop and distro on Linux and develop for that or simply only do Windows development. The majority of the users of my software are Windows users and it would be just so easy to just say stuff this mess and move to Windows 7.
dinotrac

Jan 26, 2013
12:37 PM EDT
I suspect that the uptick I've seen in developers using Macs has something to do with the crappy state of desktop Linux. The GNOME fiasco coming on the heels of the KDE fiasco can't help the situation.

At least the KDE guys managed to come in from the dark, taming their desktop and --- wonder of wonders -- learning a thing or two about their place in the Linux ecosystem.
cmost

Jan 26, 2013
3:43 PM EDT
@ dinotrac

I started out on Linux back in 2003 with KDE. When KDE 4 was released, I fled to Gnome 2.x. When Gnome 3.x debuted, I fled back to KDE. By that time (~ KDE 4.4) KDE's desktop had stabilized quite a bit and many users concerns had been addressed. The KDE team continues to address user feedback and implement changes accordingly. I think it's notable that throughout the tumultuous KDE 4 transition plasma-desktop was never forked. That's what I believe to be the major problem with Gnome right now. The developers don't seem to care what the users want or need; they have a vision that they're going to implement regardless of what users want, hence the multitude of Gnome forks in recent months. And this notion that computer users are idiots or prefer touch-screen interfaces is absurd. Let users decide what they want and allow them to choose the interface of their choice. Isn't Linux all about choice?
dinotrac

Jan 26, 2013
3:53 PM EDT
cmost --

Choice is a good thing, and one of the big imperious and self-important errors made by the KDE developers was their failure to recognize the importance of choices made by then-current KDE users. GNOME team ditto only worse for their failure to heed KDE's cautionary tale.

I started using KDE back in 1998,btw, before it ever reached 1.0 status. Before that, we had some, ummm, interesting GUIs -- well, e! was always interesting, honestly, and windowmaker, too -- and you could get along just fine with fvwm.

It really really hurt to abandon KDE when 4.0 came out, but I've been using xfce since then and been mostly happy. I have put 4.9 on my wife's laptop, and we'll see how that goes.
Koriel

Jan 26, 2013
6:27 PM EDT
Ive been using XFCE 4.6 through to 4.10 since the untimely death of KDE 3.5 and will be staying with it for as long as I remain developing on the Linux platform, how long that will be remains to be seen.
tracyanne

Jan 26, 2013
8:01 PM EDT
I dumped KDE with 4.0 and went to GNOME 2, I've tried various other desktops including XFCE (my partner uses XFCE), but I'm not a great fan of it, I actually feel more restricted. I went back to KDE as of 4.6, and really love what it has become.

My beef with the KDE developers wasn't the vision they had, which has actually been pretty constant, it was the implementation. Too much of the useful old stuff wasn't working at all or very badly, and the new flashy stuff, which the KDE team member I had an email argument with was very excited about, seemed pointless to me, I I couldn't actually do the things I was using a computer for.

As it is I use very few of the flashy things even now, but the important thing to me is that by and large the basic functionality and work flow are rock solid, and seems to get better as time goes by.
HoTMetaL

Jan 27, 2013
7:14 AM EDT
@tracyanne: in what ways did you find XFCE restrictive? I switched to it last summer (from GNOME 2) and was impressed by it's incredible customizability. The company I work for has also decided to move it's Linux desktops from GNOME 2 to XFCE in the coming months (they use the 'LTS' versions of Ubuntu alongside the Windows crud). It was determined that GNOME 3 and Unity was unfit for business use. Among those DEs with a larger installed user base, KDE and XFCE seem the most 'sane' and practical of them all.
Koriel

Jan 27, 2013
5:47 PM EDT
I also find XFCE highly customisable especially Thunars custom actions which I love and initially went overboard with but have now trimmed them back somewhat :)
tracyanne

Jan 27, 2013
6:24 PM EDT
There were Things I couldn't do the way I wanted, for example I had to resort to using keyboard "fast key" combinations in places where i normally use a mouse (one of the things i dislike about Unity and GNOME 3 Shell btw), I did have problems with networking on my install, but I later found out that was a quirk of the install process that bit me. I also had issues with not being able to set up a network share in the default filemanager... I later found out there is no intention to include network capabilities like that in the filemanager (that may have changed more recently).

Things like that make a desktop environment feel restrictive
djohnston

Jan 27, 2013
7:51 PM EDT
Quoting:I later found out there is no intention to include network capabilities like that in the filemanager (that may have changed more recently).


It has evidently changed. (http://i48.tinypic.com/wlayrb.jpg) For older versions of Thunar, there is the gigolo application for handling network shares. In newer versions of Thunar, browsing network shares is bult in.

Koriel

Jan 27, 2013
11:11 PM EDT
Browsing network shares is built into thunar but I think what Tracy means is it is not easy to share a folder and she would be right it currently isn't easy.

It used to be but the Thunar shares plugin is in a broken state at the moment and was removed whether it will be reinstated is anyone's guess.

I have custom actions set up to allow me to both share and unshare of folders at a click from within Thunar and can supply them to anyone who wants them.

See here for more info and the custom actions http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=197&t=88255
djohnston

Jan 28, 2013
2:36 AM EDT
Quoting:I have custom actions set up to allow me to both share and unshare of folders at a click from within Thunar and can supply them to anyone who wants them.

See here for more info and the custom actions http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=197&t=88255


That is a good tutorial, Koriel. Thanks!

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