The Linus view of GNOME 3.2

[mike cloaked]

On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:

>>> Linus is a kernel developer and not a UI developer.  Thus, his opinion
>>> does not matter.
>>> Since Linus is not a UI developer, he is only an end user.  Thus, the
>>> opinions of end users don't matter.
>> ----
>> I think his opinion matters as much as anyone else (and I gather that in
>> the eyes of Gnome developers, not so much).
>>
>> You know my feelings as I too am a KDE 4 survivor ;-) To make an omelet,
>> you have to break some eggs. I think there is a core of long time Linux
>> users who were upset because their familiar interface changed. Such is
>> progress.
>
> Change for the sake of being different is not progress, it's marketing. Changing
> the way things work to break the old tools so people will ue YOUR tools instead
> the 3rd party stuff is how MSFT got big, it is less appealing in open source,
> where "ours is better and yours doesn't work any more" sounds a lot like "ego trip."
>
> The computer should work the way the users want it to work, not the other way
> around. And scrapping all your old computers because they don't have magic video
> cards for visual cruft is not in the cards.

I have been watching this thread with interest - I went through the
tinkering process with gnome3 and also with KDE - I abandonned gnome3
as it did not suit me - I tried KDE 4.0 when it first was released but
did not like it at that time. Then I stuck with KDE3.7.3 at f16
release for a while - after a couple of weeks I started to feel that
was not for me either and had some stability issues which remain as of
my last test a couple of days ago - then I tried xfce - and very
quickly found that it did everything I wanted from a DE, both speedily
and efficiently as well as with stability. Yes I had to learn the
tweaks, and which additional packages were needed to be installed to
make the optimisations I wanted possible (for all three desktop
environments) but in the end I had a choice which I was happy with. I
have not tried lxde but I know others like that DE also. There are
some things that are still buggy in all three but my own DE happiness
just happened to come with xfce on the three machines that I am now
running it on.

I guess all the DEs available will evolve in time but at least we all
have a choice and although each DE will vary in popularity every
individual should find one of them to be mostly to their taste?  I do
think that long running arguments that are largely critical of one or
other DE giving significant negative feedback to those who write the
code don't provide the kind of feedback that would lead to developers
being encouraged to become enthusiastic about moving forward, but
positive requests for enhancement might have a better chance of
finding a receptive ear - it would be interesting to hear the views of
developers directly though.

-- 
mike c