Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Alex GS]

cschalle wrote:
---
...I am well aware of this, I meet or call with a lot of these customers on
a regular
basis. And I also spend time working with them to prepare their transition
to
GNOME 3 as part of their RHEL 7 transition.

...I am generally negative to any such solutions as they tend to suck
resources away from advancing something over to trying to keep multiple
options sorta working together...
---

As a long time former Mac user I can tell you that Apple has had retained
the same desktop design from it's early days and has continued to develop
and refine it over decades. In fact Apple has launched a new MacPro
specifically for workstation users to use on their traditional desktop Mac
OS showing they're committed to the traditional desktop metaphor and see a
bright future ahead. Just because Apple launched iOS on the iPhone and iPad
didn't mean it totally abandoned Mac OS and decided to force it's MacBook,
iMac and MacPro customers to use iOS. They keep both interfaces separated
as two different products in parallel.  Both have the same core and
regularly share innovations in a very healthy innovation cycle.

Why can't Gnome, Fedora and Red Hat do the same?

Unfortunately what Ubuntu, Fedora and others have done defies commercial
logic.  They think that "being like Apple" means pursuing innovation no
matter the cost even to the point of being reckless.  As a result
abandoning Gnome 2 was single biggest business mistake the commercial Linux
distributions made and has cost them the equivalent of billions of dollars
in growth and market-share.

The point is Gnome 2 can sync in parallel with Gnome 3 and the restrictions
and policies in place are purely artificial and it hurts the business.

Apple kept it's traditional desktop product and is actually expanding it's
Unix workstation user-base by catering to the traditional desktop
workstation user.

Mac OS is what the Linux desktops should have been, a stable traditional
desktop metaphor that's supported and maintained for decades.

Microsoft is suffering because it made this decision.  They attempted to
force their workstation users to adopt a mobile oriented interface in
Windows 8, the hated Metro interface.  Now third parties are selling Start
Menu replacements.  In a major updated planned for post-Windows-8.1
Microsoft will enable "boot to desktop" mode so users can go directly to
the desktop and bypass the Metro interface.

It's very simple, Gnome as a single product with two different interfaces
Gnome 2 (Mate) and Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell) relying on the same modern core
infrastructure as well as a collection of default applications and
toolkits. The combined communities of MATE and Gnome Shell would be a force
in the open source world.  They could easily unify the Linux desktop space
and provide a single coherent product.

In the end you have to drive Red Hat subscription revenues.  You are
accountable to Red Hat shareholders. To that end you have to follow the
leaders in the high-end workstation space Apple and Microsoft and match
their traditional desktop products, avoid their mistakes and exceed
expectations.
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