Senior GNOME dev says users not being ignored

regarding gnome 3 however even though Untz is measured and thoughtful it is clear he does not take the criticism as seriously as he should. This desktop was forked by MATE, heavily modified by Cinnamon, discarded by Ubuntu and completely eviscerated by Linus Torvalds. Those are all actions to reflect on a bit more seriously I submit.

It is true that the internet encourages extreme and negative views but I think the actions I pointed to above indicate that the issue here is much more serious than a bunch of folks with different viewpoints being internet trolls.

In the end people vote with their feet hence the success of Mint. This should be the most serious issue of all. Developing for a little used platform or one heavily modified downstream is not a fate I would want as a developer.

Considering that the two largest enterprise distributors (Red Hat and SUSE) are sticking with GNOME tells me that the platform will not be "little used". Quite the contrary.

"I am not the best person to explain it," he says, "but the design process does not work best by only listening to what people are telling us. We have a vision of what we want to achieve, but we do take feedback. We don't want to ignore people, but we cannot accommodate all views.

In other words, they only listen to those who are already on the Gnome Shell bandwagon. Fair enough I suppose.

> In other words, they only listen to those who are already on the Gnome Shell bandwagon. Fair enough I suppose.

Honestly, yes. If it's what they want to do, then let them do it, and let them find a user base which appreciates their work. I won't be in It, but I doubt they really care about that.

That's pretty much the same attitude I took with KDE when they ignored the complaints of their existing user base, and it's the one I'm taking with Gnome 3. My only regret is that they used the same names. KDE4 isn't KDE as it's user base knew it, and Gnome 3 isn't Gnome.

You don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but if it insists on biting you, you don't keep it in your barn either.

I'm about 90 percent GNOME 3, 10 percent Xfce 4.8 at the moment.

I've been torture-testing FTP in Thunar (with help of the poorly named Gigolo) since FTP in Nautilus isn't as good as it should be; this is a hangover from GNOME 2, meaning it wasn't any better in what some might call the good old days. Nautilus does a poor job of reconnecting you to your FTP server once that server has dropped the connection due to idleness (something I'm an expert at, idleness that is).

This is still the best article on why GNOME made the leap it did:

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GNOME-from-abyss-to-co...

@jdixon: I actually like KDE 4. If you haven't tried it lately it is definitely worth a look. I know you prefer Slackware and since it's going to be included in Slackware 14 you have a built in incentive :)

> I actually like KDE 4. If you haven't tried it lately it is definitely worth a look.

As far as usability, Caityn, KDE 4 sounds like it's usable since about 4.6 or so. And it's actually been in Slackware for quite a while. I even have it installed since I upgraded to 13.37 in preparation for upgrading to 14.0 (and I removed Trinity since there are no official packages for Slackware 13.37, and aren't likely to be any for 14.0).

I just don't have any use for it. My preferred desktop environment has been XFCE for a long time now. I only used KDE for those occasions when XFCE didn't have the tools I needed. And the three KDE programs I use run fine under XFCE.

Except for emergencies, I don't stop at stores where the staff insults me, doesn't carry what I want, and ignores my opinions. Why should software be any different?

@Caitlyn,

Fair points you are likely correct. Perhaps that actually is part of the problem since a guaranteed distro stops the gnome devs from listening. From Red Hats viewpoint (who are the most significant player here) I suspect that desktop issues are secondary to future plans.

I am looking more and more toward KDE and yes, I will admit I am a shallow, shallow individual.

I have tried all the DE and WM options in the past three months and KDE is not only pretty it is stable, smooth and fast. Hats off to the KDE Devs for turning things around.

I am also back to KDE, after a long hiatus ... That said, my first order of business is to disable nepomuk & stringi, immediately,... followed by uninstalling kontact (and the associated baggage), as well as stripping several other packages out.

But KDE, relieved of the bulk, can even manage an efficient desktop on a 900 MHz Celeron EEE PC (1st gen.) with an 8GB SSD... And even adding Cairo-dock doesn't create too much trouble... Not a gaming rig, but useable as a family comms (communication) workstation. It actually outperforms Android-x86 4.0.X. Even Google Talk/Voice works ok at a reasonable video resolution.

I think I have too much experience on old hardware. I have been using XFCE as my heavy desktop quite a bit lately, I admit. On a lot of my older and low powered systems though, you'll find Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, and occasionally Enlightenment 17 lately.

@helios KDE has been looking great on my older test machine (Pentium 4 at 1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM). I'm not a KDE fan, but it does run and look good -- and without 3D acceleration this machine can't do the full GNOME 3.