Gnome (S)hell - Its underlying principles are an insult to users

Well I have more to thank you for the article that will shortly appear in print (and bits && bytes)

"Newly Discovered Life Form"

Nasty bunch of non singing Dinos thrives in unfriendly environments and retorts in kind.

This Dino caused the real Dinosaurs a sense of foreboding and fear.

Resulted in their premature extinction of all Dinosaur species, with the exception of the humanoid form of non singing Dinos.

Despite his assertion of respect for single cell life forms and even molds, this beast is known to trample upon them with obvious gusto and ill intent.

Therefore, distrust all words that emanate from whatever form a dino happens to take. You will know him by his tracs.

Enough for now,

YBT

@txt:

Premature? Did you ever meet any of those guys? Good riddance! Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group.

Party planning was an absolute abomination. Never could get a T Rex to understand the correct meaning of "dinner guest".

Dino, Sir, Exalted One ...

So you taught the full gamut of T Rexes and close relatives dinner manners?!!

God Father, I have a favor I wish to ask ...

YBT

@Txt --

No, unfortunately not. I did lose a lot of dinner guests, though.

> Sure he explained it alright, but didn't present any solid substantive evidence for anyone to believe it.

That would be "I've got nothing", then. The evidence you claim to want would be the public actions and comments of the KDE developers themselves, which should be readily available for anyone to review. I'll leave it up to any interested observers to review those comments and see if Dino's analysis is accurate or not. In my view it's not only accurate, but actually overly kind.

Entire textbooks could (and may for all I know) be written using the KDE4 project as an example of how not to handle a software development project. If they are, I can only hope that they don't have to add an addendum for Gnome 3.

> No, unfortunately not. I did lose a lot of dinner guests, though.

While I can't speak to the matter personally, I understand their table manners left much to be desired too. :)

Is this what passes for a flame war on LXer?

{sigh}

Nothing for it then, I suppose, but to declare you all "Honorary Canadians".

Quoting: [...] I suppose, but to declare you all "Honorary Canadians".

So now you are making Swiss Cheese of facts. I resent the implications, since I swan the Rio Grande to get here ... length wise my GPS navigator was on the fritz that day, week, month or year. You know electronics, when they get wet you are lucky if they even run.

YBT

I knew it, I knew it.......I retire to the arms of Morpheus and you all romp about again. Loved all the comments, even if this thread is now totally "twisted". With all these compliments, backhanders and international flavours (including mouldy cheeses) I have no choice: you are also all invited to become honorary Australians - you'll fit perfectly even if you take up the Canadian offer first because they all seem to be marvellous people from the few I have met. Only one condition however: you buy your own boomerang, spears and pass a test on the didgeridoo.

Oh, by the way Txt, slime moulds have traditionally been placed in the fungal kingdom and hence have been part of the array of organisms that I have studied. Fascinating "things" - they move in their early stages, but then stop and produce a fruiting body with spores.

I second Jdixon's comment above.....I sincerely hope that the Gnome team have given considerable thought to this release and educating the community on how to use the software. But from the comments, I cannot help thinking that this is another example of a software package that a community (in this case Gnome) didn't want and has been forced onto them. Lots of dust to settle though.

Molson beer!

@Tuxchick.......had never heard of Molson Beer; but after a little search, found out what it is, where it is from and where it is available in Australia. What with Dino and Txt subverting my usually serious nature, and you trying to lead me down the flowery path of .......well, whatever......Now I shall have to darn well go and see if I can find some in Brisbane.......

@ Bernard Swiss......I suppose this IS the LXer form of flame wars.......but with a lot more serious debate and laughter than sometimes occurs elsewhere. Incidentally, I note we have both commented elsewhere on the author who believes DRM should be introduced to Linux, and both of us find the idea utterly ridiculous.

Molson shmolson.

If you want to end every senence with "eh?", you've got to guzzle you some LaBatt's 50.

Ginger beer!

You haven't really had Molson until you've tried Molson Brador... only sold in Canada. The alcohol content is too high for the U.S. market.

Good to see the desktop wars are still alive and well. I've been running Linux as my primary OS for 13 years now. Some things never change.

Quoting:They brought that upon themselves. Changes of this magnitude should be eased into the Linux user's experience, not dropped upon them like an anvil.

But helios..Microsoft does it so it must be ok right? ;-)

We're all just lowly users who are only able to enjoy the benefits of FOSS because of the immense efforts of the divine and omnipotent devs...

And if the devs didn't feel that way, then changes rolled out to the users would be different wouldn't they?

You know what? Drink enough Brador and you won't even notice that the user experience is different or painful. It will all seem just fine.

(Edit) p.s.: I don't even like beer.

I read that there's already a Fedora tool to tweak Gnome3 back to more of a Gnome 2-like experience... By the time I'm ready to upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, there'll be many more tools... Beyond the developers that made these design decisions, of course. Unity?!?! Gnome Shell?!?! Bah!!! As long as I can have my Cairo-dock & Compiz, I'm golden.

I think Bruce Byfield's article pretty much nailed it:

In short, the devs (Unity, Gnome3) took the current results of ongoing UI research, assumed the principles discovered so far were settled, invariable, universally applicable Laws Of Nature, and drove hell-for-leather in the direction of the promised Nirvana like gold-crazed prospectors stampeding to the Klondike Gold Rush.

How much this was driven by how much by desire to improve the UI, how much by the desire simply to tinker, and how by the pursuit of mass popularity, is harder to figure.

I've been spending quite a bit of time running Ubuntu 10.04 with our beloved GNOME 2 (in addition to my main Squeeze, Debian that is, with -- yes! -- GNOME 2).

caitlyn that may be a state by state limitation, I can get 18 proof beer in Alaska and have gotten 20 proof in Oklahoma.

az,

More than the state, what was the season? Sounds more like antifreeze than beer.

YBT

Gnome Shell is meant for single tasking users on small screen devices. If you are on a smart phone or even on a netbook it makes some some sense. Even if you are on a large format desktop display but only run one application at a time it might be OK. But, if you are multitasking on a high-power large-screen desktop it is useless. One size no longer fits all users. Linux just serves too wide a range of users for one interface to fit all. So the Gnome and Unity developers are going for the lowest common denominator. The rest of us have to look somewhere else.

The fact that they are ending support/use of panels kills the deal for me. What could be easier than putting your most-used apps in the panel for easy access? I have both top and bottom panels and my apps are one click away...not buried in the application menus or dependent upon the use of a search field to bring up the app. More importantly, I don't have to drop to my desktop to get to them.

http://www.heliosinitiative.org/myfiles/panel.png

Functionality beats Gee-whiz-isn't-this-shiny every time. Especially when shiny requires two to three more mouse clicks to perform the same task.

I haven't done much research on it but I am guessing someone will take on the 2.32 gnome project as Trinity did for KDE 3.x. I am further guessing who ever does it will have quite a following. Personally, I would financially support such an effort with quarterly contribution$.

I'm further curious to see if or how Mint will be involved.

Take a look at the size of the Mint team:

http://www.linuxmint.com/teams.php

Given the number of distributions they are currently producing, I don't think they have sufficient people to take on such a massive task... even before one considers the disparate interests of the members.

And do we really want them to dramatically increase the size of their team? Or is part of the reason why they've been so successful their organization (i.e., a tight-knit group)?

@DrGeoffrey You may have something there, It seems to me that the smaller tight knit groups are producing better software at the expense of speed and quantity.

XFCE is a prime example, excellent software although a slow pace of development and since they are a small group I get the impression they concentrate their efforts on the important things and not puff & bloat.

Slackware is another example of excellent software from a small team.

I suspect that the XFCE team may soon see an influx of developer refugees from those not enamored with Gnome & Unity development direction. What happens to the excellent software provided by the current XFCE team if their ranks should suddenly grow.

And has anybody noticed how some of the best software is being done by the pseudo dictatorships Slackware & Patrick, Mint & Clement a firm hand at the tiller seems to do the trick.

Just my observations

This is the third high rank exec to abandon ship at Canonical in just the past few weeks.

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Canonical-Chief-De...

Noting that she was in charge of design, I am guessing she either had irreconcilable differences with Shuttleworth or she couldn't stand the hail of fire from hacked-off users responding to Unity.

Again, just guessing here but it substantiates the point made above about smaller software development environments. Although I don't care for it much, Bill Reynolds did/does a pretty good job at the helm of PCLinuxOS.