Good morning/afternoon/evening.
As a BLFS GNOME maintainer, I am trying to follow upstream discussions
and other news related to projects.
Today while I was reading news I found out some interesting things
related to the project.
GNOME 3 fallback mode (the GNOME 2 look-alike where no 3D acceleration
is required to run it) is going to be dropped from next GNOME release,
3.8 [1].
That would require users that don't have powerful enough hardware or
good enough drivers with proper 3D support to use OpenGL software
rasterizer called llvmpipe (a llvm accelrated software rasterizer) which
runs OpenGL decoding on CPU [2]. The driver itself needs lot of CPU
power to do serious OpenGL and yet it is only up to OpenGL 2.1
compliance as far as I know.
There is already a discussion going on phoronix regarding the "issue" [3].
From my point of view, I started disliking GNOME more and more after
every 3.x release. For me, the 3.2 release was *best* by far. And after
I found out that GNOME devs actually don't care what users need and they
do the things that they think users need. One example was "taking apart"
nautilus file manager with 3.6 release. One of the reasons was: "It does
not work on TOUCH (yes, TOUCH!) and we will remove it", but lot of users
said that feature was useful for them [4].
As soon as I've seen that, I decided that I wouldn't stick with GNOME
anymore. I've already migrated to KDE (currently using 4.9.3) and I feel
happy with it, but I still have GNOME 3 installed.
Even Linus doesn't like GNOME and you can see him ranting on his Google+
page a lot about it [5].
But, taking the useful features apart is just part of the story. They
also implement "features" that they demand useful (gnome-documents?
really ...) while there are lot of bugs open in their bugzilla.
Also, with every release they make GNOME more and more emo (emotional
and crying about everything - no offense). Not so long ago, it was
mentioned "Ooops, there is an error ..." thing on the list. That is only
one of the useful features where GNOME devs decided that they let
gnome-session display a message with "sad emotion :(" saying that there
is "something wrong" (you don't say!) instead of actualy telling us what
is wrong! There is an article called "Ooops, I ruined your life" on [6]
making fun of such error messages.
Linus also said that GNOME 3 makes him feel like emo (because most of
the interface is black).
To make it more interesting, even some of GNOME devs seem to notice that
project is going down highway to hell, and some of them have left the
project [7].
As for me, I already said that I switched to KDE, but still have GNOME.
But not for long. On my next build I won't even bother to build it. I
got used to KDE just nicely (I like eye candy).
That said, I won't maintain GNOME in the book and if you ask me, you can
drop it completely. In BLFS we don't tend to force users to do something
and keeping GNOME would force (some) users to use mesa with llvm for
llvmpipe in order to use GNOME.
There is 3.6.2 release comming and that would be last revision regarding
GNOME from me.
Have a nice day.
(I reserve all rights to have some typos or gramatical errors in the post)
[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2012-November/msg00009.html
[2] http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html
[3]
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?75054-GNOME-3-8-Is-Dropping-Its-Fallback-Mode
[4]
http://berndth.blogspot.com/2012/08/nautilus-extra-pane-removal-myth-busting.html
[5] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LinusTorvalds/posts/UkoAaLDpF4i
[6] http://www.cooper.com/journal/2012/01/oops_i_ruined_your_life.html
[7] http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/
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