Well, I've tried GNOME 3 now...

[John Morris]

On Sat, 2011-04-23 at 07:50 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> GNOME 2.0 came out in 2002, so we had that interface for nine years.
> It's not like no-one gave it a chance.

Quite the contrary, people seem to like it and are confused when things
that work are replaced with things that don't.

Chris Adams upthread was on to something when he observed that GNOME3
isn't an upgrade over GNOME2, it is something new and different.

Had it been honestly pitched that way everyone interested in GNOME could
have known their favorite desktop project's maintainers had abandoned
them over a year ago and made the decision to either step up and
maintain it or put the effort into picking a new one.  

More importantly for the topic of a Fedora mailing list, had Fedora
evaluated it as two events, the abandonment of the GNOME project and a
new effort based on parts of the GTK and GNOME libs (kinda like XFCE)
it is doubtful, as a new and immature effort at reinventing the desktop,
it would currently be the default desktop for the Fedora project.  As
just another desktop spin there would be zero controversy over GNOME3.
There would of course have been a major bikeshedding flameorama over
which of the existing desktops would have been promoted to the new
default.

Viewed from an outsider's perspective the root of this problem seems to
be too many of the dreamers behind GNOME3 are in RedHat and too deeply
connected to the Fedora maintainers, also mostly walking the same
cubefarm at RedHat.  It would have been easier to tell some outside
group they were getting kicked to an alternate spin and would have to
compete to regain the default position purely on merit.

Whether GNOME3 is a good idea for GNOME depends on whether there really
is this mythical pool of new users they keep tossing their existing
users over the side of the boat in a quest for.  As someone who deals
with public library users (currently on GNOME2) in a deeply rural area I
can tell ya there aren't many totally virgin users left in the USA, so
perhaps they are going for the third world.  Perhaps they really are on
the brink of bringing about 'the year of the Linux Desktop.'  Either
way, good for them because they are doing what they want to do and will
either change the world or learn an important lesson.

What isn't really debatable is that GNOME3 isn't a good fit for Fedora
as very few Fedora users are going to be inexperienced new users. Few
existing fedora users are looking for what GNOME3 is selling.  Some
might end up accepting it, but that isn't the same thing.  Fedora should
not be buying into a policy of chasing off existing or experienced users
in the hope there are newbies waiting to jump in because that isn't
Fedora's stated mission.  The problem appears to be that there was never
a debate so none of these questions were even asked until the release
calendar had already imposed a commitment to ship GNOME3 as the default.

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