Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 7:30 PM, Alex GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 14:52 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 12:57:08PM -0600, Jim Campbell wrote: But if the MATE developers directed their attention to making the GNOME Classic Session all that they want it to be rather than supporting an aging, legacy codebase, I think both parties would be better off. Or convincing Xfce developers to use more GNOME components, to have just the Xfce panel with the applets with all the rest of GNOME. Sébastien ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
There are always a lot of opinions. GNOME 3 is controversial but then things in Linux generally become that way because people are passionate and they care. Designing good desktops involves a lot of artistic expression and experimentation. It's hard work and really difficult to achieve. Then there's the gut-wrenching feeling of seeing your hard work tossed around and harshly criticized. Open-source is brutal that way. I appreciate the work you guys have been doing, you've been taking the risks and just wanted to reach out and say, thank you. If you're going to have GNOME 3 be something it should that thing and make no compromises. That's why I don't like GNOME Classic. An interface like that has no business being in GNOME 3 at all. On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 1:57 PM, Jim Campbell jcampb...@gnome.org wrote: On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 7:30 PM, Alex GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 14:52 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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? Thanks, Allan After some deep reflection and considerations I finally got the root of my frustration with the GNOME project. In reality I don't have anything against GNOME 3. It's that GNOME has been slow to adapt to the changes in the GNOME ecosystem. The central problem is the idea of having a single dedicated desktop product. That's why I propose the GNOME Meta-Desktop. Posted below is the Problem statement of this proposal as a preview. I've posted the full proposal to the wiki.gnome.org so you can comment on points directly. --- GNOME Meta-Desktop Problem For some time now, Linux has been evolving beyond the idea of the single desktop platform. This is not Windows where each platform is bolted down to a single desktop interface design. Unfortunately projects like GNOME have been slow to adapt. GNOME's focus on a single dedicated desktop interface design has caused the Linux desktop space to fragment causing divisions and frictions between the various communities. This has also deprived commercial Linux platforms the ability to shape desktops that fit strict requirements demanded by their target markets. Currently and unofficially GNOME is evolving into a meta-desktop with GNOME Shell, Cinnamon and MATE the resultant outputs of this evolution. This brings along with it several problems such as fragmentation and redundancies. The GNOME meta-desktop needs to be standardized, needs community collaboration and needs GNOME in-house desktop products to drive it forward. https://wiki.gnome.org/AlexGS/GnomeMetaDesktop Thank you for your time and attention. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
Traditionally, GNOME shipped itself as a bag of parts that distributors would rearrange into whatever they wanted, and we were happy with this. You'd take a dash of gnome-panel, mix it with metacity or sawfish or i3wm, and then slap on some nautilus or gnome-commander. That's not how we can build a well-integrated, compelling OS. Mixing and matching components means that it's hard to test, and hard to define: all GNOME 2 was just some tarballs and some code. Projects like Cinnamon and MATE are happy to use our code (it's free software, after all), along with our infrastructure for building their own OS, so they don't have to re-translate the same strings and keep track of the same bugs, but those teams are focusing on building their own OS, not GNOME. The GNOME we're trying to build has its own vision, and it's trying to become its own well-defined product: The number-one free software operating system. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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? Thanks, Allan After some deep reflection and considerations I finally got the root of my frustration with the GNOME project. In reality I don't have anything against GNOME 3. It's that GNOME has been slow to adapt to the changes in the GNOME ecosystem. The central problem is the idea of having a single dedicated desktop product. That's why I propose the GNOME Meta-Desktop. Posted below is the Problem statement of this proposal as a preview. I've posted the full proposal to the wiki.gnome.org so you can comment on points directly. --- GNOME Meta-Desktop Problem For some time now, Linux has been evolving beyond the idea of the single desktop platform. This is not Windows where each platform is bolted down to a single desktop interface design. Unfortunately projects like GNOME have been slow to adapt. GNOME's focus on a single dedicated desktop interface design has caused the Linux desktop space to fragment causing divisions and frictions between the various communities. This has also deprived commercial Linux platforms the ability to shape desktops that fit strict requirements demanded by their target markets. Currently and unofficially GNOME is evolving into a meta-desktop with GNOME Shell, Cinnamon and MATE the resultant outputs of this evolution. This brings along with it several problems such as fragmentation and redundancies. The GNOME meta-desktop needs to be standardized, needs community collaboration and needs GNOME in-house desktop products to drive it forward. https://wiki.gnome.org/AlexGS/GnomeMetaDesktop Thank you for your time and attention. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list -- Jasper ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
It's 2014 and not 1999. That clumsy bag of parts is the reason why the Linux desktop failed. We're in a brave new Linux world where Red Hat now makes over a billion dollars a year, powers the New York Stock Exchange and Google has two Linux products Chrome OS and Android. Requirements have changed and we have Wayland and systemd now as guiding examples of the way forward. Linux projects that fail to consolidate their efforts and collaborate in an organized way are now obstacles to progress slowing everyone down. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 14:36 -0500, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: Traditionally, GNOME shipped itself as a bag of parts that distributors would rearrange into whatever they wanted, and we were happy with this. You'd take a dash of gnome-panel, mix it with metacity or sawfish or i3wm, and then slap on some nautilus or gnome-commander. That's not how we can build a well-integrated, compelling OS. Mixing and matching components means that it's hard to test, and hard to define: all GNOME 2 was just some tarballs and some code. Projects like Cinnamon and MATE are happy to use our code (it's free software, after all), along with our infrastructure for building their own OS, so they don't have to re-translate the same strings and keep track of the same bugs, but those teams are focusing on building their own OS, not GNOME. The GNOME we're trying to build has its own vision, and it's trying to become its own well-defined product: The number-one free software operating system. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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? Thanks, Allan After some deep reflection and considerations I finally got the root of my frustration with the GNOME project. In reality I don't have anything against GNOME 3. It's that GNOME has been slow to adapt to the changes in the GNOME ecosystem. The central problem is the idea of having a single dedicated desktop product. That's why I propose the GNOME Meta-Desktop. Posted below is the Problem statement of this proposal as a preview. I've posted the full proposal to the wiki.gnome.org so you can comment on points directly. --- GNOME Meta-Desktop Problem For some time now, Linux has been evolving beyond the idea of the single desktop platform. This is not Windows where each platform is bolted down to a single desktop interface design. Unfortunately projects like GNOME have been slow to adapt. GNOME's focus on a single dedicated desktop interface design has caused the Linux desktop space to fragment causing divisions and frictions between the various communities. This has also deprived commercial Linux platforms the ability to shape desktops that fit strict requirements demanded by their target markets. Currently and unofficially GNOME is evolving into a meta-desktop with GNOME Shell, Cinnamon and MATE the resultant outputs of this evolution. This brings along with it several problems such as fragmentation and redundancies. The GNOME meta-desktop needs to be standardized, needs community collaboration and needs GNOME in-house desktop products to drive it forward.
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
hi; On 5 February 2014 20:03, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. this is pretty much the only thing that you and I agree on. sadly, from different angles. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. so your idea, which would reduce fragmentation by reincorporating other projects, is to go back at doing exactly what we were doing before? I hope you can see the cognitive dissonance hidden in this whole thing, especially the four basic issues that your idea does not take into consideration. in short: let's go back doing what GNOME 2.x did (which does not take into consideration that doing so proved to be unsustainable to the point that the people that were doing it decided), and MATE and Cinnamon will cease to exist (which doesn't take into consideration the fact that both MATE and Cinnamon *want* to do something of their own while starting off from the GNOME code base, and that reintegration at this point would mean abandonment), and at the same time we can do experimentations (i.e. the current GNOME 3.x) on the side (which does not take into consideration the fact that the people that do work on GNOME already decided what to work on years ago). on top of this, you're assuming that the Foundation can dictate the technological direction of the project, or that it can allocate resources — both assumptions being unfounded in reality. I'm sorry you don't like the direction of GNOME. this does not mean you get to decide where the project should go just because you don't like it. ciao, Emmanuele. -- W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 15:03 -0500, Alexander GS wrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. Do you expect me to read your mail if you start telling me things that everybody knows and make me wonder if you think I'm stupid? Plus I have no idea how your posting refers to the posting that you replied to. Think about it. I didn't. andre -- Andre Klapper | ak...@gmx.net http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
Andre I never said you were stupid. It's an expression and perhaps it was a bit too blunt. Sorry. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 21:34 +0100, Andre Klapper wrote: On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 15:03 -0500, Alexander GS wrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. Do you expect me to read your mail if you start telling me things that everybody knows and make me wonder if you think I'm stupid? Plus I have no idea how your posting refers to the posting that you replied to. Think about it. I didn't. andre ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
(Red Hat does not make over a billion dollars a year. The billion dollars was profits, not revenue. We're still a fairly small company operating on tight margins) I agree that the clumsy bag of parts model is not a good one. That's why we changed it for GNOME3, in that we're trying to build and ship an integrated, tested OS instead of a bunch of tarballs. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.comwrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. That clumsy bag of parts is the reason why the Linux desktop failed. We're in a brave new Linux world where Red Hat now makes over a billion dollars a year, powers the New York Stock Exchange and Google has two Linux products Chrome OS and Android. Requirements have changed and we have Wayland and systemd now as guiding examples of the way forward. Linux projects that fail to consolidate their efforts and collaborate in an organized way are now obstacles to progress slowing everyone down. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 14:36 -0500, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: Traditionally, GNOME shipped itself as a bag of parts that distributors would rearrange into whatever they wanted, and we were happy with this. You'd take a dash of gnome-panel, mix it with metacity or sawfish or i3wm, and then slap on some nautilus or gnome-commander. That's not how we can build a well-integrated, compelling OS. Mixing and matching components means that it's hard to test, and hard to define: all GNOME 2 was just some tarballs and some code. Projects like Cinnamon and MATE are happy to use our code (it's free software, after all), along with our infrastructure for building their own OS, so they don't have to re-translate the same strings and keep track of the same bugs, but those teams are focusing on building their own OS, not GNOME. The GNOME we're trying to build has its own vision, and it's trying to become its own well-defined product: The number-one free software operating system. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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? Thanks, Allan After some deep reflection and considerations I finally got the root of my frustration with the GNOME project. In reality I don't have anything against GNOME 3. It's that GNOME has been slow to adapt to the changes in the GNOME ecosystem. The central problem is the idea of having a single dedicated desktop product. That's why I propose the GNOME Meta-Desktop. Posted below is the Problem statement of this proposal as a preview. I've posted the full proposal to the wiki.gnome.org so you can comment on points directly. --- GNOME Meta-Desktop Problem For some time now, Linux has been evolving beyond the idea of the single desktop platform. This is not Windows where each platform is bolted down to a single desktop interface design. Unfortunately projects like GNOME have been slow to adapt. GNOME's focus on a single dedicated desktop interface design has caused the Linux desktop space to fragment causing divisions and frictions between the various communities. This has also deprived commercial Linux platforms the ability to shape desktops that fit strict requirements demanded by their target markets.
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
We can agree to disagree on this point. I also want to say that I mean no offense. GNOME 3 is an excellent project. Really, I can appreciate how much energy and passion you and the team have put into it. But I just want to clarify that my comments and Proposal in no way shape or form maligns or put's down GNOME 3 or the hard work you've put into it. My primary concern isn't GNOME 3. It's the lack of a commercially viable GNOME 2 based desktop product. It's also the fragmentation of the GNOME desktop and migration to alternatives like KDE or XFCE. These two factors indicate that GNOME is not in a healthy situation and is beginning to decline in relevance. That's all. The GNOME 2 and community issues are issues that need to be addressed. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 20:17 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: hi; On 5 February 2014 20:03, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. this is pretty much the only thing that you and I agree on. sadly, from different angles. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. so your idea, which would reduce fragmentation by reincorporating other projects, is to go back at doing exactly what we were doing before? I hope you can see the cognitive dissonance hidden in this whole thing, especially the four basic issues that your idea does not take into consideration. in short: let's go back doing what GNOME 2.x did (which does not take into consideration that doing so proved to be unsustainable to the point that the people that were doing it decided), and MATE and Cinnamon will cease to exist (which doesn't take into consideration the fact that both MATE and Cinnamon *want* to do something of their own while starting off from the GNOME code base, and that reintegration at this point would mean abandonment), and at the same time we can do experimentations (i.e. the current GNOME 3.x) on the side (which does not take into consideration the fact that the people that do work on GNOME already decided what to work on years ago). on top of this, you're assuming that the Foundation can dictate the technological direction of the project, or that it can allocate resources — both assumptions being unfounded in reality. I'm sorry you don't like the direction of GNOME. this does not mean you get to decide where the project should go just because you don't like it. ciao, Emmanuele. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
Agree. I like the way GNOME 3 is heading to: tight integration. This could definitely brings better UX and easier to test, as a user and a developer, I like the way it works. However, this doesn't mean that GNOME 3 does not encounter any problems. GNOME 3 is building from scratch compare to GNOME 2 after all. A innovative big idea is not enough, to become the number-one free software OS, solid implementation and feature rich (at least enough for the users) are also crucial. I think this is really the issue for GNOME 3 now. I remember when gnome-shell decided to integration input method, as a developer, I thought it was really good direction, and when the implementation came out, it was hardly usable: because input method integration are designed from ground up, developers does not take into application input context into account, and causing massive number of users stay away from that integration, just because it's unusable for them. I don't know how does the testing goes inside RedHat, but I found GNOME 3 still needs to be tested far more than now before each release. Example above indicates that the testing process does not even consider about existence of input context at all. BTW, may be a little off topic. I'm confused a bit about the target or the goal of GNOME 3 right now. Just this morning I was told on the bugzilla that GNOME maintainers are not meant to be the slaves of popularity contests. Does this imply that GNOME 3 will not target for number-one free software OS? There are a lot of feature requests in the mailing list and bugzilla by the users, and maintainers decided to drop them for simplicity. It seems to me that maintainers of various components do not want it to be popular, or at least do not want to be popular among those users who requested those features. (I'm not being hostile at this idea at all, it's completely understandable and for sure a lot of ugliness are introduced by feature requests by massive users.) On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Jasper St. Pierre jstpie...@mecheye.netwrote: (Red Hat does not make over a billion dollars a year. The billion dollars was profits, not revenue. We're still a fairly small company operating on tight margins) I agree that the clumsy bag of parts model is not a good one. That's why we changed it for GNOME3, in that we're trying to build and ship an integrated, tested OS instead of a bunch of tarballs. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.comwrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. That clumsy bag of parts is the reason why the Linux desktop failed. We're in a brave new Linux world where Red Hat now makes over a billion dollars a year, powers the New York Stock Exchange and Google has two Linux products Chrome OS and Android. Requirements have changed and we have Wayland and systemd now as guiding examples of the way forward. Linux projects that fail to consolidate their efforts and collaborate in an organized way are now obstacles to progress slowing everyone down. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 14:36 -0500, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: Traditionally, GNOME shipped itself as a bag of parts that distributors would rearrange into whatever they wanted, and we were happy with this. You'd take a dash of gnome-panel, mix it with metacity or sawfish or i3wm, and then slap on some nautilus or gnome-commander. That's not how we can build a well-integrated, compelling OS. Mixing and matching components means that it's hard to test, and hard to define: all GNOME 2 was just some tarballs and some code. Projects like Cinnamon and MATE are happy to use our code (it's free software, after all), along with our infrastructure for building their own OS, so they don't have to re-translate the same strings and keep track of the same bugs, but those teams are focusing on building their own OS, not GNOME. The GNOME we're trying to build has its own vision, and it's trying to become its own well-defined product: The number-one free software operating system. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: We can agree to disagree on this point. I also want to say that I mean no offense. GNOME 3 is an excellent project. Really, I can appreciate how much energy and passion you and the team have put into it. But I just want to clarify that my comments and Proposal in no way shape or form maligns or put's down GNOME 3 or the hard work you've put into it. My primary concern isn't GNOME 3. It's the lack of a commercially viable GNOME 2 based desktop product. It's also the fragmentation of the GNOME desktop and migration to alternatives like KDE or XFCE. These two factors indicate that GNOME is not in a healthy situation and is beginning to decline in relevance. That's all. I think what would be appropriate is to actually have these projects join the GNOME Foundation as official projects. Cinnamon, Elementary OS, Mate, and others all depend on GNOME upstream. Without GNOME, they cannot survive. I consider these core parts things like dbus(kdbus?), GTK+, GLib, GStreamer, GOBject and so forth. GNOME Foundation will help provide some amount of money towards hackfests, infrastructure that help these projects with the recognition that helping them also helps them improve our upstream. I expect these projects to participate in GNOME core upstream projects in return. GNOME gets additional voices and resources and hopefully evolve a structure that we can all work together implementing our unique projects. Unification will be our strength. Diversity will give us robustness in the platform. Together, we would leverage each other and our ideas and make a very healthy eco-system. GNOME Foundation gets new voices, and maybe even potential new board members as well with different perspectives. sri The GNOME 2 and community issues are issues that need to be addressed. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 20:17 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: hi; On 5 February 2014 20:03, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. this is pretty much the only thing that you and I agree on. sadly, from different angles. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. so your idea, which would reduce fragmentation by reincorporating other projects, is to go back at doing exactly what we were doing before? I hope you can see the cognitive dissonance hidden in this whole thing, especially the four basic issues that your idea does not take into consideration. in short: let's go back doing what GNOME 2.x did (which does not take into consideration that doing so proved to be unsustainable to the point that the people that were doing it decided), and MATE and Cinnamon will cease to exist (which doesn't take into consideration the fact that both MATE and Cinnamon *want* to do something of their own while starting off from the GNOME code base, and that reintegration at this point would mean abandonment), and at the same time we can do experimentations (i.e. the current GNOME 3.x) on the side (which does not take into consideration the fact that the people that do work on GNOME already decided what to work on years ago). on top of this, you're assuming that the Foundation can dictate the technological direction of the project, or that it can allocate resources -- both assumptions being unfounded in reality. I'm sorry you don't like the direction of GNOME. this does not mean you get to decide where the project should go just because you don't like it. ciao, Emmanuele. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
We're still a fairly small company operating on tight margins. That's a problem I'm attempting to address by suggesting bringing back a modern but conservative and business friendly GNOME 2. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 15:40 -0500, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: (Red Hat does not make over a billion dollars a year. The billion dollars was profits, not revenue. We're still a fairly small company operating on tight margins) I agree that the clumsy bag of parts model is not a good one. That's why we changed it for GNOME3, in that we're trying to build and ship an integrated, tested OS instead of a bunch of tarballs. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. That clumsy bag of parts is the reason why the Linux desktop failed. We're in a brave new Linux world where Red Hat now makes over a billion dollars a year, powers the New York Stock Exchange and Google has two Linux products Chrome OS and Android. Requirements have changed and we have Wayland and systemd now as guiding examples of the way forward. Linux projects that fail to consolidate their efforts and collaborate in an organized way are now obstacles to progress slowing everyone down. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 14:36 -0500, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: Traditionally, GNOME shipped itself as a bag of parts that distributors would rearrange into whatever they wanted, and we were happy with this. You'd take a dash of gnome-panel, mix it with metacity or sawfish or i3wm, and then slap on some nautilus or gnome-commander. That's not how we can build a well-integrated, compelling OS. Mixing and matching components means that it's hard to test, and hard to define: all GNOME 2 was just some tarballs and some code. Projects like Cinnamon and MATE are happy to use our code (it's free software, after all), along with our infrastructure for building their own OS, so they don't have to re-translate the same strings and keep track of the same bugs, but those teams are focusing on building their own OS, not GNOME. The GNOME we're trying to build has its own vision, and it's trying to become its own well-defined product: The number-one free software operating system. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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? Thanks, Allan After some deep reflection and considerations I finally got the root of my frustration with the GNOME project. In reality I don't have anything against GNOME 3. It's that GNOME has been slow to
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 16:00 -0500, Mike wrote: [...] I don't know how does the testing goes inside RedHat, but I found GNOME 3 still needs to be tested far more than now before each release. Example above indicates that the testing process does not even consider about existence of input context at all. Wait a minute. GNOME is developed by a bunch of people, volunteers and from different affiliations. Some of them are Red Hat employees to work full time on GNOME, everybody appreciate that. But that is not a reason to dismiss the effort of many volunteers who work on GNOME in their spare time. It is known in GNOME that we lack of testers, people who take the time to build and test the whole desktop *before* it is released. That was also true in the GNOME 2 era. Something that should start changing with gnome-ostree (you should take a look at that!). You would be very welcome to test GNOME and file descriptive bugs that allow to improve the quality of a GNOME release. BTW, may be a little off topic. I'm confused a bit about the target or the goal of GNOME 3 right now. Just this morning I was told on the bugzilla that GNOME maintainers are not meant to be the slaves of popularity contests. Does this imply that GNOME 3 will not target for number-one free software OS? There are a lot of feature requests in the mailing list and bugzilla by the users, and maintainers decided to drop them for simplicity. It seems to me that maintainers of various components do not want it to be popular, or at least do not want to be popular among those users who requested those features. (I'm not being hostile at this idea at all, it's completely understandable and for sure a lot of ugliness are introduced by feature requests by massive users.) If one million of flies like sh*t, it does not mean that the sh*t is good. Try to walk on maintainer/volunteer shoes. Let's assume I am maintainer: In my not copious spare time, I work on the features I would like to use myself. I will be happy hacking on them and I will be happy using them once they are done. If those are good for you, great. If those makes my application popular, great. If not, move on. I prefer to work on something I enjoy, rather than allowing other people to set my priorities and make unhappy in my spare time. However, I am open to discuss fair points that make me change my priorities, but that should not take more time than I would use for hacking. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 16:00 -0500, Mike wrote: [...] I don't know how does the testing goes inside RedHat, but I found GNOME 3 still needs to be tested far more than now before each release. Example above indicates that the testing process does not even consider about existence of input context at all. Wait a minute. GNOME is developed by a bunch of people, volunteers and from different affiliations. Some of them are Red Hat employees to work full time on GNOME, everybody appreciate that. But that is not a reason to dismiss the effort of many volunteers who work on GNOME in their spare time. It is known in GNOME that we lack of testers, people who take the time to build and test the whole desktop *before* it is released. That was also true in the GNOME 2 era. Something that should start changing with gnome-ostree (you should take a look at that!). You would be very welcome to test GNOME and file descriptive bugs that allow to improve the quality of a GNOME release. Actually, we are spinning up a GNOME QA team. It's been a slow start, but we are hoping that we can start work on doing the right testing and also get help from teh community at large to help. sri ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 4:33 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 16:00 -0500, Mike wrote: [...] I don't know how does the testing goes inside RedHat, but I found GNOME 3 still needs to be tested far more than now before each release. Example above indicates that the testing process does not even consider about existence of input context at all. Wait a minute. GNOME is developed by a bunch of people, volunteers and from different affiliations. Some of them are Red Hat employees to work full time on GNOME, everybody appreciate that. But that is not a reason to dismiss the effort of many volunteers who work on GNOME in their spare time. It is known in GNOME that we lack of testers, people who take the time to build and test the whole desktop *before* it is released. That was also true in the GNOME 2 era. Something that should start changing with gnome-ostree (you should take a look at that!). Thanks, I should really try that and give some feedback by running that in a VM. You would be very welcome to test GNOME and file descriptive bugs that allow to improve the quality of a GNOME release. BTW, may be a little off topic. I'm confused a bit about the target or the goal of GNOME 3 right now. Just this morning I was told on the bugzilla that GNOME maintainers are not meant to be the slaves of popularity contests. Does this imply that GNOME 3 will not target for number-one free software OS? There are a lot of feature requests in the mailing list and bugzilla by the users, and maintainers decided to drop them for simplicity. It seems to me that maintainers of various components do not want it to be popular, or at least do not want to be popular among those users who requested those features. (I'm not being hostile at this idea at all, it's completely understandable and for sure a lot of ugliness are introduced by feature requests by massive users.) If one million of flies like sh*t, it does not mean that the sh*t is good. Try to walk on maintainer/volunteer shoes. Let's assume I am maintainer: In my not copious spare time, I work on the features I would like to use myself. I will be happy hacking on them and I will be happy using them once they are done. If those are good for you, great. If those makes my application popular, great. If not, move on. I prefer to work on something I enjoy, rather than allowing other people to set my priorities and make unhappy in my spare time. However, I am open to discuss fair points that make me change my priorities, but that should not take more time than I would use for hacking. As I said, I truly understand your points: for sure a lot of ugliness are introduced by feature requests by massive users. I have maintained something popular before, and I know exactly how that felt. :) I'm just saying that this is certainly different from the goal Jasper mentioned, (which confused me a little.) -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ -- Thanks Mike ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
One of the things that makes open-source projects sustainable is corporate involvement and sponsorship. Due to the success of Chrome OS and Android in the corporate and education market and the transition of many institutions to open-source technologies there's a huge opportunity for a coherent and standardized Linux desktop workstation. One of the major goals of the GNOME Meta-Desktop project was a commercially oriented and managed GNOME 2 sub-project involving companies like IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and many others. Could such a project be feasible in the new structure? On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 13:08 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: We can agree to disagree on this point. I also want to say that I mean no offense. GNOME 3 is an excellent project. Really, I can appreciate how much energy and passion you and the team have put into it. But I just want to clarify that my comments and Proposal in no way shape or form maligns or put's down GNOME 3 or the hard work you've put into it. My primary concern isn't GNOME 3. It's the lack of a commercially viable GNOME 2 based desktop product. It's also the fragmentation of the GNOME desktop and migration to alternatives like KDE or XFCE. These two factors indicate that GNOME is not in a healthy situation and is beginning to decline in relevance. That's all. I think what would be appropriate is to actually have these projects join the GNOME Foundation as official projects. Cinnamon, Elementary OS, Mate, and others all depend on GNOME upstream. Without GNOME, they cannot survive. I consider these core parts things like dbus(kdbus?), GTK+, GLib, GStreamer, GOBject and so forth. GNOME Foundation will help provide some amount of money towards hackfests, infrastructure that help these projects with the recognition that helping them also helps them improve our upstream. I expect these projects to participate in GNOME core upstream projects in return. GNOME gets additional voices and resources and hopefully evolve a structure that we can all work together implementing our unique projects. Unification will be our strength. Diversity will give us robustness in the platform. Together, we would leverage each other and our ideas and make a very healthy eco-system. GNOME Foundation gets new voices, and maybe even potential new board members as well with different perspectives. sri The GNOME 2 and community issues are issues that need to be addressed. On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 20:17 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: hi; On 5 February 2014 20:03, Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com wrote: It's 2014 and not 1999. this is pretty much the only thing that you and I agree on. sadly, from different angles. GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community. so your idea, which would reduce fragmentation by reincorporating other projects, is to go back at doing exactly what we were doing before? I hope you can see the cognitive dissonance hidden in this whole thing, especially the four basic issues that your idea does not take into consideration. in short: let's go back doing what GNOME 2.x did (which does not take into consideration that doing so proved to be unsustainable to the point that the people that were doing it decided), and MATE and Cinnamon will cease to exist (which doesn't take into consideration the fact that both MATE and Cinnamon *want* to do something of their own while starting off from the GNOME code base, and that reintegration at this point would mean abandonment), and at the same time we can do experimentations (i.e. the current GNOME 3.x) on the side (which does not take into consideration the fact that the people that do work on GNOME already decided what to work on years ago). on top of this, you're assuming that the Foundation can dictate the technological direction of the project, or that it can allocate resources -- both assumptions being unfounded in reality. I'm sorry you don't like the direction of GNOME. this does not mean you get to decide where the project should go just because you don't like it. ciao, Emmanuele. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 15:44 -0500, Alexander GS wrote: snip My primary concern isn't GNOME 3. And it's pretty much our only concern. Stop copying me on Google+ posts as well, I have no interest in working on GNOME 2. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
hi; On 5 February 2014 21:00, Mike mikeandm...@gmail.com wrote: Agree. I like the way GNOME 3 is heading to: tight integration. This could definitely brings better UX and easier to test, as a user and a developer, I like the way it works. However, this doesn't mean that GNOME 3 does not encounter any problems. GNOME 3 is building from scratch compare to GNOME 2 after all. this is entirely untrue, and a myth that ought to be dispelled (pretty much on par with the GNOME 3 is made for tablets one). the entirety of GNOME 3 is based on code that has been in the making since GNOME 2.x. GNOME 2.32 itself was built on *very* different libraries than GNOME 2.0. what got removed between 2.32 and 3.0 was cruft accumulated over the years, not actual used functionality. on top of those existing technologies, those existing hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of lines of code, new technologies have been built, and are built to this day. the idea that GNOME 3 is built from scratch is a fantasy. BTW, may be a little off topic. I'm confused a bit about the target or the goal of GNOME 3 right now. Just this morning I was told on the bugzilla that GNOME maintainers are not meant to be the slaves of popularity contests. Does this imply that GNOME 3 will not target for number-one free software OS? popularity contests seldom lead to anything reasonable. feedback drives informed changes, not polls or votes. and, at the end of the day, developers and designers get to design, implement, and maintain what the users are going to use. our license and our development model allows anybody to become a contributor to the project, or to fork it if they don't like the direction; what our license and development model do not imply is that the people working on the project are bound to satisfy the requests of *everyone*. ciao, Emmanuele. -- W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 15:40 -0500, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: (Red Hat does not make over a billion dollars a year. The billion dollars was profits, not revenue. We're still a fairly small company operating on tight margins) Vice versa, I presume. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
Whoops, yes. I got mixed up. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 7:14 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.orgwrote: On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 15:40 -0500, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: (Red Hat does not make over a billion dollars a year. The billion dollars was profits, not revenue. We're still a fairly small company operating on tight margins) Vice versa, I presume. -- Jasper ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
2014-02-04 Alexander GS alxgrtnstr...@gmail.com: CC'd over from the Fedora Desktop developers mailing list: On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 19:04 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote: This is a very contentious topic, and you're promoting a minority view (I suspect GNOME and KDE are much more popular in Fedora than the other desktops), so lots of disagreement is to be expected. On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 12:22 -0500, Alex GS wrote: Gnome Shell is a feature/product/package focused on mobile interaction for hybrids and touch enabled devices including tablets. GNOME (capitals please, same for MATE) is focused on desktop and laptop computers, including laptops with touchscreens. GNOME has to support touchscreens well because Windows has gone that route, and 90% of laptops ship with Windows. Tablets are a secondary concern because very, very few people are running GNOME on tablets. They're basically touchscreen laptops without keyboards, though, so I don't think they're much of a stretch. Typically I associate the word mobile with phones, and nobody runs GNOME on phones. A new startup, Endless Mobile, is trying to. I wish them well, but I've yet to see reason to believe that will work well. (Which is fine, since they're new.) Anyway, it sounds like you're spot-on part of the target audience for GNOME Classic. I'm sure the developers would be interested in feedback on why that environment doesn't currently meet your needs, and how it might be improved to do so. If you look at MATE's road-map you'll quickly see most objections against it aren't valid. They're actively moving closer to core GNOME infrastructure such as GTK3, systemd and Wayland as well as defaulting to current GNOME packages in increasing numbers. Several GNOME packages from git.gnome.org have also been adopted by MATE's developers such as gnome-main-menu. If you look at www.ohloh.com below MATE is a very active project with over 2 million lines of code, 64 contributors and the last commit was made 4 days ago. GNOME 2 is alive and thriving and evolving with a large user-base among the top distributions Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu 14.04, OpenSUSE and many others including Fedora. Compare this to GNOME Shell which has only around 81K lines of code, twice as many contributors at 157 and the last commit was 2 days ago. http://www.ohloh.net/p?ref=homepageq=mate+desktop http://www.ohloh.net/p?query=gnome+shellsort=relevance This presents a very complex situation for GNOME. What does does GNOME do if they have two active thriving desktop products on the market coexisting in parallel? Clearly GNOME Classic hasn't addressed the traditional desktop use-case and isn't seen as a GNOME 2 replacement. Right, you say GNOME 3 Classic hasn't addressed your use case. But would you care to explain how it is different from an hypothetical GTK3 Mutter-based MATE with the GNOME 3 applications? GNOME 3 Classic has a window list, traditional menus, static workspaces, a window-based Alt-Tab and a huge list of addons and panel applets (they're known as extensions and they're provided by third parties, but they are the same thing). And really, GNOME 3 (Core or Classic) is far more configurable than GNOME 2 has ever been: you can move your panel, hide it, change the contents, move the contents, move the notifications... How is that not the traditional desktop metaphor? How is that different from MATE? What do we gain by dropping all that on the floor? Should we readopt MATE (well, mate-panel and mate-applets, if I understand your proposal correctly, and maybe libwnck), how would we find the resources to maintain two different compositor infrastructures, two very different styles of handling the desktop shell at the technical level (one is a compositor plugin, the other is a separate process talking EWMH)? What about wayland: who will implement the desktop shell protocol in gnome-panel and mutter (provided one complete enough is ever developed by weston)? Note that for GNOME 3 we don't need it, because the shell and the compositor are in the same process. Not to mention all the other session services currently provided by the Shell, such as the screensaver, the keybinder and the screenshotter: who would reimplement these in a way compatible with GNOME 3 Core, and keep them updated as the interfaces change? What about the feature difference: is it acceptable not to have integrated chat in the hypothetical GNOME 2 interface? Or removable disk notifications? Or a screen recorder? Or even a bluetooth status indicator? None of that is covered in the roadmap, by the way. On the other hand, what is covered in the roadmap is a lot of work in the low-level components and the applications - both of which are not part of the proposal, and I believe would be rejected straight away. Yes, I understand there is a need from some people for a traditional desktop metaphor, because change after 20+ years is not easy, but we already have
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
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? Thanks, Allan ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 22:22 -0500, Alexander GS wrote: When you abandon active and popular products like that you cause developers to fork your product and keep it in active development. Just like the MATE team is doing today. In reality MATE is providing the free support and development that GNOME should really be doing. GNOME is not a company, and we can't force anybody to work on anything. If developers (or companies that employ developers) are interested in continuing GNOME 2 development, they can do so. That's why I propose the following: Proposal: GNOME Foundation adopts GNOME 2 (MATE) as an official GNOME desktop alongside GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell). As I recall, we reached out to MATE and asked them if they'd like to continue GNOME 2 development under the GNOME umbrella, including use of our infrastructure and brand. They declined. That's their right. I don't know how we can do your proposal. We could make a statement that GNOME 2 development can continue, but unless developers volunteer to put in time to make it happen, it's an empty statement. -- Shaun ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 14:52 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
Btw. Just realized that the post has a bunch of typos, hope you don't mind a quick re-post to fix those! 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 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 continual 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 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 to date. 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.
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 20:30 -0500, Alex GS wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 14:52 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 13:09 +, 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. I wouldn't mind if the response wasn't horribly flawed. It seems to boil down to GNOME 2 was released around the same time as MacOS X so it was awesome. Furthermore, we obviously don't agree that GNOME 2 is that great, otherwise we'd still be working on it. So you'd have to do a *lot* more convincing. Finally, I'd point out that MacOS X has made pretty extensive UI changes, some of them clearly inspired by GNOME 3. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
CC'd over from the Fedora Desktop developers mailing list: On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 19:04 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote: This is a very contentious topic, and you're promoting a minority view (I suspect GNOME and KDE are much more popular in Fedora than the other desktops), so lots of disagreement is to be expected. On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 12:22 -0500, Alex GS wrote: Gnome Shell is a feature/product/package focused on mobile interaction for hybrids and touch enabled devices including tablets. GNOME (capitals please, same for MATE) is focused on desktop and laptop computers, including laptops with touchscreens. GNOME has to support touchscreens well because Windows has gone that route, and 90% of laptops ship with Windows. Tablets are a secondary concern because very, very few people are running GNOME on tablets. They're basically touchscreen laptops without keyboards, though, so I don't think they're much of a stretch. Typically I associate the word mobile with phones, and nobody runs GNOME on phones. A new startup, Endless Mobile, is trying to. I wish them well, but I've yet to see reason to believe that will work well. (Which is fine, since they're new.) Anyway, it sounds like you're spot-on part of the target audience for GNOME Classic. I'm sure the developers would be interested in feedback on why that environment doesn't currently meet your needs, and how it might be improved to do so. If you look at MATE's road-map you'll quickly see most objections against it aren't valid. They're actively moving closer to core GNOME infrastructure such as GTK3, systemd and Wayland as well as defaulting to current GNOME packages in increasing numbers. Several GNOME packages from git.gnome.org have also been adopted by MATE's developers such as gnome-main-menu. If you look at www.ohloh.com below MATE is a very active project with over 2 million lines of code, 64 contributors and the last commit was made 4 days ago. GNOME 2 is alive and thriving and evolving with a large user-base among the top distributions Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu 14.04, OpenSUSE and many others including Fedora. Compare this to GNOME Shell which has only around 81K lines of code, twice as many contributors at 157 and the last commit was 2 days ago. http://www.ohloh.net/p?ref=homepageq=mate+desktop http://www.ohloh.net/p?query=gnome+shellsort=relevance This presents a very complex situation for GNOME. What does does GNOME do if they have two active thriving desktop products on the market coexisting in parallel? Clearly GNOME Classic hasn't addressed the traditional desktop use-case and isn't seen as a GNOME 2 replacement. GNOME 2 was released back in 2002 - 12 years ago GNOME 3 was released back in 2011 - 3 years ago http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/06/26/1813231/gnome-20-released https://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2011-April/msg4.html Then look at Apple with Mac OS X: Mac OS X was released back in 2001 - 13 years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_os_x Mac OS X is a contemporary of GNOME 2 and is still in active development and supported indefinitely by regularly released minor versions 10.xx as long as Apple is solvent as a company. If GNOME was like Apple they would have launched GNOME 3 along-side GNOME 2 and simply updated and supported GNOME 2 in minor versions. Today we would be on GNOME 2.9 or 2.10. The point is that when you have an installed user-base that's as large as GNOME 2 the default of most prominent commercial Linux distributions and even Unix platforms you don't just drop support and development like that. You have to keep that massive user-base happy while you continue to develop GNOME 3 and then eventually when it's ready you slowly transition your GNOME 2 users to it. When you abandon active and popular products like that you cause developers to fork your product and keep it in active development. Just like the MATE team is doing today. In reality MATE is providing the free support and development that GNOME should really be doing. That's why I propose the following: Proposal: GNOME Foundation adopts GNOME 2 (MATE) as an official GNOME desktop alongside GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell). Work towards standardizing and unifying the Linux desktop space https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD You have to think of your brand GNOME as a collection of desktops in what is really a meta-desktop. Effectively GNOME 2 (MATE) is still an active GNOME product despite not being an official GNOME project it technically is one. The current thinking at GNOME is that GNOME Shell represents this flagship product and having alternative environments somehow represents failure of the GNOME project as a whole. This is far from the reality because success of one desktop environment GNOME 2 means success for GNOME 3 and GNOME as a whole, it means people still love your products and want to support you. GNOME 2.xx (workstation desktop) and GNOME
Re: Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product
Forget to include a citation for the MATE desktop roadmap: http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/roadmap On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 22:22 -0500, Alexander GS wrote: CC'd over from the Fedora Desktop developers mailing list: On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 19:04 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote: This is a very contentious topic, and you're promoting a minority view (I suspect GNOME and KDE are much more popular in Fedora than the other desktops), so lots of disagreement is to be expected. On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 12:22 -0500, Alex GS wrote: Gnome Shell is a feature/product/package focused on mobile interaction for hybrids and touch enabled devices including tablets. GNOME (capitals please, same for MATE) is focused on desktop and laptop computers, including laptops with touchscreens. GNOME has to support touchscreens well because Windows has gone that route, and 90% of laptops ship with Windows. Tablets are a secondary concern because very, very few people are running GNOME on tablets. They're basically touchscreen laptops without keyboards, though, so I don't think they're much of a stretch. Typically I associate the word mobile with phones, and nobody runs GNOME on phones. A new startup, Endless Mobile, is trying to. I wish them well, but I've yet to see reason to believe that will work well. (Which is fine, since they're new.) Anyway, it sounds like you're spot-on part of the target audience for GNOME Classic. I'm sure the developers would be interested in feedback on why that environment doesn't currently meet your needs, and how it might be improved to do so. If you look at MATE's road-map you'll quickly see most objections against it aren't valid. They're actively moving closer to core GNOME infrastructure such as GTK3, systemd and Wayland as well as defaulting to current GNOME packages in increasing numbers. Several GNOME packages from git.gnome.org have also been adopted by MATE's developers such as gnome-main-menu. If you look at www.ohloh.com below MATE is a very active project with over 2 million lines of code, 64 contributors and the last commit was made 4 days ago. GNOME 2 is alive and thriving and evolving with a large user-base among the top distributions Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu 14.04, OpenSUSE and many others including Fedora. Compare this to GNOME Shell which has only around 81K lines of code, twice as many contributors at 157 and the last commit was 2 days ago. http://www.ohloh.net/p?ref=homepageq=mate+desktop http://www.ohloh.net/p?query=gnome+shellsort=relevance This presents a very complex situation for GNOME. What does does GNOME do if they have two active thriving desktop products on the market coexisting in parallel? Clearly GNOME Classic hasn't addressed the traditional desktop use-case and isn't seen as a GNOME 2 replacement. GNOME 2 was released back in 2002 - 12 years ago GNOME 3 was released back in 2011 - 3 years ago http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/06/26/1813231/gnome-20-released https://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2011-April/msg4.html Then look at Apple with Mac OS X: Mac OS X was released back in 2001 - 13 years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_os_x Mac OS X is a contemporary of GNOME 2 and is still in active development and supported indefinitely by regularly released minor versions 10.xx as long as Apple is solvent as a company. If GNOME was like Apple they would have launched GNOME 3 along-side GNOME 2 and simply updated and supported GNOME 2 in minor versions. Today we would be on GNOME 2.9 or 2.10. The point is that when you have an installed user-base that's as large as GNOME 2 the default of most prominent commercial Linux distributions and even Unix platforms you don't just drop support and development like that. You have to keep that massive user-base happy while you continue to develop GNOME 3 and then eventually when it's ready you slowly transition your GNOME 2 users to it. When you abandon active and popular products like that you cause developers to fork your product and keep it in active development. Just like the MATE team is doing today. In reality MATE is providing the free support and development that GNOME should really be doing. That's why I propose the following: Proposal: GNOME Foundation adopts GNOME 2 (MATE) as an official GNOME desktop alongside GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell). Work towards standardizing and unifying the Linux desktop space https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD You have to think of your brand GNOME as a collection of desktops in what is really a meta-desktop. Effectively GNOME 2 (MATE) is still an active GNOME product despite not being an official GNOME project it technically is one. The current thinking at GNOME is that GNOME Shell represents this flagship product and having alternative environments somehow represents failure of the GNOME project as
