Underlying DE for the Workstation product, GNOME 3 and the iPhone

[Alexander GS]

On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 18:31 +0100, drago01 wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 6:22 PM, Alex GS <alxgrtnstrngl at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > aruiz wrote:
> > ---
> > Agreed. Can you point to any single GNOME feature that is tailored
> > specifically for tablet devices?
> > ---
> >
> > Gnome Shell is a feature/product/package focused on mobile interaction for
> > hybrids and touch enabled devices including tablets.
> 
> Argument by repetition does not work. You stated that before and got a
> response that this is not the case and that you should come up with
> reasons where you got that from. You simply repeated your statement.
> This is pointless.

aruiz wrote:
> > Agreed. Can you point to any single GNOME feature that is tailored
> > specifically for tablet devices?

I wanted to address this question because I think it's crucial to
understand why GNOME 2 is the only suitable default choice for Fedora
Workstation.

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 release back in 2001.

GNOME 2 released in 2002.

Apple released the iPhone back in 2007.

This document was created back in 2009.

The "new and disruptive technologies" were mobile devices such as the
iPhone. GNOME Shell itself was created as a reaction to the iPhone and
mobile form-factors.  Clearly the design has that in mind with the focus
on touch-screen interaction.

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
mobile form-factors that were just launched.

Apple released the iPad back in 2010.

GNOME 3 was released in 2011.

Let's look at that in perspective. Mac OS X (10.xx) was released in 2001
and has been in a continually state of development and refinement for
over 13 years. If GNOME was Apple then GNOME 2 would still be in active
development up to at least 2015. The current version of GNOME 2 would
probably be 2.11 or 2.12.

This is why GNOME 2 is the only suitable desktop for Fedora Workstation.
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. This convergence
concept is still highly experimental and not yet mature.  See Ubuntu's
Unity and Microsoft's Windows 8.

GNOME 2 is a fully mature and realized traditional desktop workstation
concept, battle tested and with wide general appeal to fit the
requirements of the Workstation PRD:

"We want to create a stable, integrated, polished and user friendly
system that can appeal to a wide general audience."

"Case 3: Small Company Developer"

"Case 4: Developer in a Large Organization"
 
"Or the work we are doing to provide a high performance graphics
workstation would be useful to people who want a linux gaming PC."

"Work towards standardizing and unifying the Linux desktop space"

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD

If for some reason it's too controversial to make MATE the default then
you should give the user choice at the installation phase of GNOME
Shell, MATE or KDE as per the following requirement in the Workstation
PRD.

"we want to allow developers to use the tools they prefer for their
application development yet make them all feel like a natural fit into
our integrated desktop experience."

Key phrase: "we want to allow developers to use the tools they prefer
for their application development"

Desktop environments are crucial to developer work-flows and and
allowing the developer to pick from a limited list of supported options
at install as stated above (GNOME Shell, MATE, KDE) is the best way to
optimize that.