The Linus view of GNOME 3.2

mike cloaked mike.cloaked at gmail.com
Sat Dec 3 22:31:52 UTC 2011


On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 10:24 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:

>>
>> 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.

One comment that I could make about gnome3.2 in f16 which was a real
clincher for me was that the alacarte package remains broken in f16 -
which is needed to do simple edits to the menus....  yes I found
alternatives to make new .desktop files for launching scripts that
were not part of the available package sets so that my own launchers
could be put into the dash (or dock extension), but that item was the
final straw for me for gnome3 apart from some of the other things that
I found worked better for me with the other two desktops I mentioned
in my previous post.  I know that is a negative comment - and indeed
the bugzilla report that relates to the alacarte package remains (at
least as of last night) unresolved. However it would still be better
to pursue pushing for positive change through the bug reporting system
since that is where the developers certainly will be much more likely
to read input than here?


-- 
mike c


More information about the users mailing list