Underlying DE for the Fedora Workstation product

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Feb 5 20:08:43 UTC 2014


On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 15:00 -0500, Alexander GS wrote:
> > GNOME shipped itself as a bag of parts that distributors would 
> > rearrange into whatever they wanted.
> 
> It's 2014 and not 1999.

> That clumsy bag of parts is the reason why the Linux desktop failed.
> We're in a brave new Linux world where Red Hat now makes over a billion
> dollars a year, powers the New York Stock Exchange and Google has two
> Linux products Chrome OS and Android. Requirements have changed and we
> have Wayland and systemd now as guiding examples of the way forward.
> Linux projects that fail to consolidate their efforts and collaborate in
> an organized way are now obstacles to progress slowing everyone down.
> 
> GNOME desperately needs a new better way of doing things or they risk
> becoming irrelevant in the technology industry and community.

You really need to learn to read the whole message, not read until you
find a bit you disagree with and then hit reply and drop another essay.

The full quote to which you're replying reads:

-------

Traditionally, GNOME shipped itself as a bag of parts that
distributors would rearrange into whatever they wanted, and we were
happy with this. You'd take a dash of gnome-panel, mix it with
metacity or sawfish or i3wm, and then slap on some nautilus or
gnome-commander.
 
That's not how we can build a well-integrated, compelling OS. Mixing
and matching components means that it's hard to test, and hard to
define: all GNOME 2 was just some tarballs and some code.
 
Projects like Cinnamon and MATE are happy to use our code (it's free
software, after all), along with our infrastructure for building their
own OS, so they don't have to re-translate the same strings and keep
track of the same bugs, but those teams are focusing on building their
own OS, not GNOME.

The GNOME we're trying to build has its own vision, and it's trying to
become its own well-defined product: The number-one free software
operating system.

--------

i.e. the person to whom you're replying is saying precisely the same
thing as you. The quote you took out of context was about how GNOME
*used* to do things: it was being set up in opposition to how GNOME is
*now* doing things.

You're arguing yourself into an interesting pretzel formation, here,
btw. That happens if you just decide in advance whether you're going to
agree or disagree with what a particular person has to say and then try
to poke holes in their post as you go along, rather than actually having
your own rationally-developed position, and sticking to it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net



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