Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Alberto Ruiz]

On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 11:05 -0500, Alex GS wrote:
> 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.

How long is "long time"? Mac OS X was definitively quite a departure
from Mac OS 9, and if you compare the early versions of Mac OS X and the
current one you will spot quite a bunch of differences.

> Why can't Gnome, Fedora and Red Hat do the same?
> 
Have you checked Classic mode in GNOME 3?
> 
> 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.  

Citation needed.

For one thing, the GNOME community has a live on its own, a lot of
things happened other than just a new shell, removal of long overdue
dependencies, modernization of the toolkit and the developer platform.
If GNOME was kept still, I am telling you it would be in a much worse
scenario than it is right now.

The biggest impact on GNOME's adoption was the move by Canonical from
GNOME to Unity, and that was in the making long before GNOME Shell was a
thing you could even evaluate.
> 
> 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. 

To compare a Linux distribution with Apple is not entirely fair, is it?

However, if you look at a Mac OS X desktop 10 years ago and even today,
I think most people would agree it is not the traditional desktop as
most people understand it: Win 98/XP.
> 
> Mac OS is what the Linux desktops should have been, a stable
> traditional desktop metaphor that's supported and maintained for
> decades.
> 
Right, and you can't achieve that with 10+ years of deprecated
dependencies. That's why things like GNOME 3 and KDE 4 had to happen.
> 
> 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.
> 
Agreed. Can you point to any single GNOME feature that is tailored
specifically for tablet devices?

> 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.

Again, have you checked GNOME Classic?

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz