On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 14:52 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: > On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +0000, Allan Day wrote: > > Hi Alex, > > > > Thanks for reaching out with your ideas. I'm afraid that you're > > catching us at a bad time - we are really close to UI freeze and a lot > > of us are working flat out on that. I personally don't have much time > > to spare on mailing lists right now. :) > > > > Can you explain what the GNOME 2 sub-project would actually look like? > > It's hard to respond without knowing details about how it would > > actually work. I understand that you are proposing to utilise some > > GNOME 3 modules, but how would it differ? Would it have a 3.x > > gnome-control-center? Would it have a shell? If not, which pieces > > would you use instead? Would you expect the GNOME project to make > > regular GNOME 2 releases alongside GNOME ones? Would we work to ensure > > we produce quality GNOME 2 releases as well as GNOME 3 releases? How > > would we market these two experiences? What would we recommend to > > distributions? > > The main question for me would be, why would we want a "GNOME 2"-like > sub-project in GNOME when we dropped support for a very similar > interface, the fallback mode. >
To respond that that I'll copy a response I posted to the Fedora Workstation mailing list, it's modified to address your question specifically. It provides a context for just how critically important GNOME 2 is to GNOME as a desktop product. Let's revisit the original GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell) design document: Problem Definition: "The GNOME Project released version 2.0 of the GNOME Desktop in June 2002. It was an important milestone. In the years since then, the developer community has continually and incrementally improved the experience while learning a great deal about what worked and what didn't. The entire personal computing ecosystem has been changing too - partly due to a number of new and disruptive technologies. While we won't dwell on the particulars of those changes it is important to note that there is a growing consensus in the GNOME developer community that we needed to make a leap forward in order to fix many of the flaws in our designs and to generally bring a lot more awesome into the user experience." https://people.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf The key phrases in the entire document: "The entire personal computing ecosystem has been changing too - partly due to a number of new and disruptive technologies." - and - "we needed to make a leap forward in order to fix many of the flaws in our designs." Mac OS X (10.xx) released in 2001. GNOME 2 released in 2002. Apple released the iPhone in 2007. Android released in 2008. GNOME Shell design document published in 2009. Apple released the iPad back in 2010. GNOME 3 was released in 2011. The "new and disruptive technologies" refers to mobile devices. GNOME Shell itself was created in the context of Apple's release of the iPhone and the introduction of mobile form-factors such as the Android mobile operating system. The "flaws in our designs" refers to the traditional desktop workstation designs found in GNOME 2 that they no longer felt could address the new touch oriented mobile form-factors that were just launched. It's obvious that GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell) wasn't just created for traditional workstations but was an early attempt at a convergence concept to meld mobile and desktop interfaces together. When you look at GNOME Shell (GNOME 3) today it's a near clone of Apple's iPad interface with clear references to the Apple iOS style language. This convergence concept is still highly experimental. See Ubuntu's Unity 7/8 and Microsoft's Windows 8. GNOME 3 is a highly innovative and very fascinating project but one that has yet to realize it's full potential. Due to it's potential and long-term outlook I actually intend on contributing to in terms of design, development and support. However, GNOME 3 is still hasn't matured to the point where it provides a coherent product and doesn't have a sense of what it's trying to define or where it wants to go. Looking at Android 4.4 on a Google Nexus 10 I realized it has a very long way to go, several years, if it wants to achieve a that kind of product ready state. It's still very much a BETA and not a RC. Mac OS X (10.xx) was released in 2001 and has been in a continually state of development and refinement for over 13 years. Apple demonstrated the value of continuous, incremental and methodical refinement of the same traditional Mac OS desktop metaphor. As a result developers, companies and users have come to rely on and they trust Mac OS X as a stable and mature desktop platform in which they can invest critical resources and time for the future. The sudden and abrupt abandonment of GNOME 2 was premature and damaged GNOME as a brand and project. It made GNOME a risky platform for developers & companies who felt that it was not a platform they could trust for the future. This also left users with a sense of loss that turned them against GNOME causing grief and fragmentation in the Linux desktop space. GNOME 2 remains GNOME's only fully realized core product one that has Things you can still do with GNOME 2: You can unify a divided and fragmented non-KDE Linux desktop community. You can spread freedom to hundreds of millions of users stuck with proprietary operating systems. You can attract a large user-base and make GNOME a popular workstation platform for high-performance users such as developers, designers, artists, scientists, engineers and the default at their companies and organizations. You can have had core workstation products on RHEL and Fedora such as a native Linux/GNOME optimized version of Adobe Creative Suite and/or the various CAD programs only found on Windows and Mac. You can market GNOME 2 as a stable Unix-like platform that hardware manufacturers and OEM's can take seriously and make bold bets on as a way of competing against Apple's Mac platform. You can make GNOME a viable alternative to Windows XP and Windows 7 in the corporate and education markets. Sadly without GNOME 2 you don't have a core product that's able to do any of these things. _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
