Den 30. des. 2011 15:28, skrev Nenad:
A story about indicators, etc. sounds as really good set of architectural choices. Having said that, architectural cleanup should not negatively affect existing user base by removing some workflows. Backward compatibility might slow down overall progress but green field development results in own set of problems. Ironically, technical people who would otherwise support architectural changes introduced with Unity are resistant to these changes because of some user interface shortcomings.
I completely agree with that in some senses. Unity does not take anything away. Nothing is lost because of Unity. I often compare desktop shells to the web browsers. They can be considered "web shells". They're not technically comparable, but from a users point of view, they do the same thing. When Google entered the scene with Chromium and Chrome, they added to our choices. Some distros use it by default, and that's fine. I think it's a good browser. My preference is still Firefox and I would always install it as quickly as possible. Unity adds to the number of desktops you can choose from and does not remove any choices.
However, I disagree with the notion that Unity should depend on the workflow from Gnome Panel. I would much rather that Gnome Panel continues to be developed with respect to itself and that Unity is developed with completely different goals. The world has changed a lot since the mid nineties. I think Unity reflects that, Gnome Panel not so much. But that's fine. We don't all have to be modern and walk in lines. Nobody has the legal power to remove any free software. But if software should be kept, it must be maintained, or it must be deemed to be perfect. That's difficult. If you want it to evolve, then you also need someone to actively develop it. If you want that to happen, then you need to give it attention. You should not focus on why you think Unity or Gnome Shell is bad, but on why you think Gnome Panel is good. Because that's what counts.
According to your description these specs are easy to implement for remaining panels, then why support for look & feel of Gnome Panel was marginalized remains unclear.
It's not unclear to me. Someone is paying the bills. Those someone have a different view of what the future should look like. The only thing they agree upon, is that it should not look like the past. Nothing wrong with that. Gnome wants to focus on the future of Gnome Shell and Canonical wants to focus on its vision, which is Unity. We cannot expect any of them to focus much on Gnome Panel, because that is not their vision of the future. So, if we want to keep Gnome Panel around, then we need to find some developers who are willing to keep maintaining and developing it. Perhaps people like Vincent Untz can be persuaded. If not, then we either need to find new developers, or let the old software die in peace.
Just keep in mind that _anyone_ can start developing Gnome Panel. If all the anyones on the entire planet choose not to do so, then users should begin to wonder why.
All of them contributed in serving some user groups, and none of them fulfilled "One size fits all" promises. The same will happen to Unity I guess.
It's not comparable. You can use any programming language to interact with Unity and it's very high level. Literally. If you wanted to, you could write it by hand and not require a programming language at all. It's DBus. By the way, Gnome Panel switched to that from Bonobo a few versions back. I think maybe in 10.04 or something. It was a radical switch then, too. Most people didn't notice it, though. I didn't, even if I knew it was going to happen. That's how it should be. We should do these things from time to time, but we should do them because it needs to be done, not because of hype. Whenever something dramatic happens, we must always have a large number of users who can explain why it is so. Otherwise, we get massive amounts of speculation, conspiracy theories and general disarray. It's not a matter of who's right and who's wrong. We just have to learn from this and never repeat this mistake. Proper communication would have ensured that all the nonsense would've never happened.
Users should never be expected to understand the difference between Bonobo and DBus, GTK2 or GTK3, GConf and Dconf...As a consequence, they shouldn't care about Gnome 2 or Gnome 3. It's Gnome. It really isn't that much different.
And I think that concludes todays pontification. :) Happy new year, everyone! Jo-Erlend Schinstad -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
