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Miguel de Icaza Praises Gnome 3
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Comments (16)
End users are not programmers
I don't see many people other than Miguel de Icaza praising GNOME 3. For that matter, I don't see many people praising Mr. de Icaza lately.
He should try a C#/Mono port of GNOME :o)
Well it is true that there are now many extensions for gnome 3 due to *easier* access to desktop customisation for programming literate users. They put up a website where you can try them VERY easily. Problem I found was however that they can interact and unexpected annoying things can happen. For example the tooltips for panel launchers moved 5 inches to the right of where they should have been.
So it seems to me that this customisation idea is a good one but judging from the implementation through said website a bit of a half baked after thought by developers.
The disorganisation here (and the lack of developer enthusiasm for user extensions) appears to have resulted in the partial forking of the project with the cinnamon project of Mint.
So it seems to me that this customisation idea is a good one but judging from the implementation through said website a bit of a half baked after thought by developers.
The disorganisation here (and the lack of developer enthusiasm for user extensions) appears to have resulted in the partial forking of the project with the cinnamon project of Mint.
I agree...I don't see ANY of the people I work with as a distribution developer excited about Gnome 3. They are, however, VERY excited about Cinnamon via Linux Mint.
Just goes to show you that Gnome 3 and Ubuntu via Unity are just deluding themselves and continue further down the rabbit hole.
Just goes to show you that Gnome 3 and Ubuntu via Unity are just deluding themselves and continue further down the rabbit hole.
I don't see ANY of the people I work with as a distribution developer excited about Gnome 3. They are, however, VERY excited about Cinnamon via Linux Mint.
Which makes me a bit less wary about the future of the Linux desktop. I'm using Cinnamon 1.2 on LM 12 and while right now it has definitely some rough edges here and there, it is a pleasure to use. More distributions using it in the future will only enhance the chance that Cinnamon is here to stay.
Which makes me a bit less wary about the future of the Linux desktop. I'm using Cinnamon 1.2 on LM 12 and while right now it has definitely some rough edges here and there, it is a pleasure to use. More distributions using it in the future will only enhance the chance that Cinnamon is here to stay.
Im currently running Linux Mint 12 with the XFCE 4.8 extension :)
Its a doozy.
Its a doozy.
Yes I am also using cinnamon and even though it is labelled as alpha software it is a pleasure to use and highly functional already. They also have a good webpage where you can get applet, theme and extension goodies:
http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/
http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/
I guess I'm midway between user and programmer, but I think the ability to write extensions in Javascript instead of C++ or (insert language here) is a pretty good thing.
@Steven, yes I'll take javascript as a language form developing extensions, ove c?C++ anyday.
Besides, many users (non-programmers) write macros for Exell/word and even write html/javascript for personal web pages. I too think it is a pretty good thing.
Is someone here able to comment about the security implications of using javascript for the desktop?
Is it really a good idea to use the same code for scripting web-pages and the desktop?
It strikes me as asking for trouble, but I'm not really qualified to an opinion on the subject.
Is it really a good idea to use the same code for scripting web-pages and the desktop?
It strikes me as asking for trouble, but I'm not really qualified to an opinion on the subject.
@Bernard: Aside from the security implications (which I doubt are that important; it's a desktop, not a web browser; even if it's using the same technologies underneath, it's not directly transferring data from untrusted sites on the internet), what about the performance implications? Using Javascript, an interpreted language, to render your UI? Along with CSS (which is an abomination of a standard)? It just sounds dumb. Web technologies are fine for the web, but it makes no sense to hobble yourself with parsed and interpreted languages/stylesheets, rather than using C or C++ to write your UI system. In case anyone hasn't noticed, computers aren't getting any faster the way they used to. Now they just tack on a few more cores, but those cores aren't much faster than they were 5 years ago, and one process can only run on one core. We don't need software designers maxing out our CPUs and saying "the hardware will be 4 times as fast in 1.5 years so let's not worry about it". It's not 1999 any more.
Admits Moonlight/Silverlight are basically dead
Swapnil: One of the ambitious and promising Mono projects was Moonlight. What is the future of Moonlight?
Miguel: We are somewhere between Silverlight 2-3 support . The reality is that Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and at this point they are not going to continue developing it and they are not going to continue to push it. So the point of having an open source implementation of silverlight is greatly diminished.
Hindsight is 20/20 but the development effort probably would have been better spent on Mono itself. Charge of the light brigade? Perhaps. But it may have helped encourage Adobe to support Flash for Linux.
Miguel: We are somewhere between Silverlight 2-3 support . The reality is that Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and at this point they are not going to continue developing it and they are not going to continue to push it. So the point of having an open source implementation of silverlight is greatly diminished.
Hindsight is 20/20 but the development effort probably would have been better spent on Mono itself. Charge of the light brigade? Perhaps. But it may have helped encourage Adobe to support Flash for Linux.
Quoting:The reality is that Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and at this point they are not going to continue developing it and they are not going to continue to push it. So the point of having an open source implementation of silverlight is greatly diminished.
So, if or when MS abandons .Net, is Mono going to suffer the same fate?
Is Microsoft going to abandon .Net developers?
Microsoft’s Silence is Infuriating .NET Developers
Quoting:So, if or when MS abandons .Net, is Mono going to suffer the same fate?
Answer:not necessarily.
Mirosoft abandoning Silverlight is a quite different kettle of fish from Microsoft abandoning .NET, and any affect of Microsoft doing that is quite different from the affect of Microsoft abandoning Silverlight.
.Net is a Languange framework, and a runtime library (it is what Java had the potential to be). Silverlight is little more than a clone of Flash, better in some ways, but still just a product built on top of .Net, and designed to replace Flash. Thankfuly inertia saved us from a Microsoft monopoly in this area.
Both those headlines above are typical clickbait, Metro doesn't even come close to making .Net unnecessary, and therefore ripe for abandonment. Metro is built on top of .Net. The latest version of Visual Studo depends on .Net for building Metro applications.
But lets assume Microsoft for whatever monopolistic reason they choose, decides to abandon .Net. Lets assume they have pent millions on building something that replaces the .Net Framework and runtime, that once again gives them a more desirable lock in on Windows (after all the .net is inherently crossplatform, surely that was a mistake, surely they did not intend for this to happen), just what affect would this have on the development and continuance of Mono?
Well it might slow the development of Mono down initially, as the Mono developers rely on Microsoft for the continued innovation of Mono, so would it be a bad thing if De Icaza and his team had to innovate all by themselves? Would it be a bad thing if Mono was no longer dependant on Microsoft fo the innovation of the technologies in Mono?
Remember Mono is, by virtue of it's inherent cross platform capabilities can be made available on all platforms .Net is not available on any platform but Windows, and due to Microsoft policy is unlikely to be.
So as I see it if Microsoft were to stop supporting .Net, that would potentially make Mono stronger, after all ther are millions of lines of code that are already written for .Net, that can with often little change be made to work with Mono, unlike the situation with VisualBasic (the pre.Net version), where there are and were no VisualBasics on any other platform), and remember even when a Company stops supporting a product, that product doesn't immediatly become unusable... I can still get jobs as a VB6 developer, maintaining old code, right now, and earn a damn sight more than I can as a .Net developer, if I'm prepared to move interstate. The consequence of this is that companies who were heavily dependent on .Net can move to Mono, which makes Mono a viable product, and a replacement for a non supported .Net, and it gives the Mono Devs time to develop in the framework code that is not yet in Mono (from the perspective of those shops that use the latest and greatest .Net innovation)
So in the very very unlikely event of Microsoft discontinuing support for .Net, I see a very rosy future for Mono.
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End users don't program. Period. If an end user programs, he has become a programmer (how ever good or bad).
This mind set of "I you don't like it, fix it yourself." is nice in a hacker culture. Once your software is used by millions of people with a thousand other things to do than learning Java script and the (largely undocumented) programming model of Gnome Shell, it is just kicking people who are already down.
But this is business as usual.