On 13/02/2013 13:36, Stroller wrote: > > On 13 February 2013, at 10:39, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> … >> I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but I really do not see the >> point of Gnome3 at all. It has no identity of its own … >> >> So what's the point of Gnome3? >> >> If people like the Unity-ish bits, they should run Unity. Same with the >> KDE and MacOS bits. > > Politics? > > You know the history between Ubuntu / Unity and Gnome, don't you? > > AIUI Ubuntu did a huge set of patches to Gnome to provide notifications, and > they were rejected. > > AIUI there was a big thing between Shuttleworth and some of the Gnome devs, > with Shuttleworth saying that the patches were discussed with Gnome devs; > Shuttleworth claimed they'd followed the Gnome devs' advisement, agreed the > best way forward and notifications (and their API) had been implemented on > the understanding they'd likely be accepted. However it was a couple of > different Gnome devs that claimed responsibility for this area, and that > they'd decided to do things differently, and that basically Ubuntu's work was > an unwelcome code dump - thanks, but no thanks. > > Thus Ubuntu made Unity, and Gnome carried on with doing it their way. > > There were a couple of really long articles on Shuttleworth's blog about this > at the time. They're actually really interesting reading, if you've got the > time for an epic, an insight into the politics or "society" of OSS > development. The impression I got was that there was some upset, but actually > no-one had deceived anyone or stitched anyone else up, it was just a > misunderstanding (or series of misunderstandings) due to the nature of the > relationships / hierarchies involved in the two development groups. But I > think Shuttleworth was a bit aggrieved and felt the only way to get what he > wanted was to develop Unity in house, and Gnome wasn't going to stop what it > was doing just because Ubuntu were doing something similar-but-different.
I do remember most of that, although I never read up on it in lots of detail. It was something that was happening "over there" and I could easily keep it out of my head space. Unity has been shipping for ages now, what is it? 3 years at least? And if my memory serves, Gnome 3 is *very* much more recent in a shippable state. It certainly looks like Gnome is copy-catting, and doing it badly. I'm still struggling to see where Gnome figures it's going to fit in in the world. What are the devs trying to build and what is their vision for their project? Because I just don't see one at all. Saying things like "we want to build a modern, functional, relevant desktop for todays needs" is really just marketing crap, it tells you nothing. It's empty vapid words devoid of meaning (if the sentence was a human it would be the dumb blonde stereotype from sitcoms). Windows8 is modern, functional, yadda yadda yadda...., for that matter so is Android Eclair. All the progress I see from Gnome3 (and I get this only from blog posts on the tubes) is that stuff is being ripped out and replaced with mostly nothing. Take a file manager; I understand the concept of treating your stuff on disk as meta-stuff and you just search for stuff, the desktop tells you where your stuff is, even if it's in the cloud. But sometimes the user really does want to view his stuff as actual files and folders. So, err, where's the file manager? Why is the system settings app a straight rip right out of KDE4? Even the categories and names are recognizably the same. I would think SystemSettings is the one major part of a desktop where Gnome would *not* copy something else. If anything in a desktop needs to follow your overall vision for the user, it would be that one. So I dunno, I look at the project and what I'm seeing is a bunch of folks with an aura of "we actually have no idea really what we are doing..." I'm not saying that's the way it is, I'm saying that's the conclusion I'm coming to based on what I see on the screen. I'd still really like someone who groks what Gnome3 is all about to fill in these blanks in my understanding with truthiness ;-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
