What People Are Saying About GNOME [Part 1]

[cruiseoveride]

Word cloud please!

[deanjo]

Word cloud please!

Now there is one heck of a suggestion.

[prokoudine]

Keep in mind that Michael is a one man show for the most part. Not only is he doing the benching, writing, researching, developing for Phoronix but he also has his other 'lives' of running his company and holy crap maybe he can fit in a bit of a personal life in there as well time permitting. Have you guys ever once noticed that articles (usually multiple in a day) often posted for what would be really early in the morning or really really really late at night for him? Cut the man some slack. Have any of you guys even ever tried submitting an article to Michael? It's real easy to bitch about someone's elses work but offer nothing back in aid to change the situation.

As a one-man show guy who works in pretty much same conditions to another one-man show guy: as far as excuses go, this one is rather lame.

Once again, the first article on the subject was a piece of opinionated crap that was clearly designed from ground up to cause a lot of turmoil. It was way below the quality level that I've grown to know Phoronix for.

After lots of complaints we got article number two which basically boils down to this: "So you didn't like just negative stuff? Fine! Eat this 1K of unmoderated comments to the survey and now you have no right to say I'm biased." This exactly what it reads like, planned or not planned.

Being neck-deep in work has nothing to do with attitude. And as far as i can tell it really is the attitude that causes all the negative comments here in the forum. I hope you can cope with that.

Simply put, nobody forces people to read Phoronix, but if you open a forum and allow people to comment on stuff you publish, you will get your bit of negative comments either way. Whether they are constructive and whether you can deal with constructive critisim is an entirely different matter.

[deanjo]

As a one-man show guy who works in pretty much same conditions to another one-man show guy: as far as excuses go, this one is rather lame.

So is trying to compare a site with multiple staff to another with a staff of one who actually generates and researches his own content instead of relying on the work of others.

Once again, the first article on the subject was a piece of opinionated crap that was clearly designed from ground up to cause a lot of turmoil. It was way below the quality level that I've grown to know Phoronix for.

After lots of complaints we got article number two which basically boils down to this: "So you didn't like just negative stuff? Fine! Eat this 1K of unmoderated comments to the survey and now you have no right to say I'm biased." This exactly what it reads like, planned or not planned.

Being neck-deep in work has nothing to do with attitude. And as far as i can tell it really is the attitude that causes all the negative comments here in the forum. I hope you can cope with that.

Simply put, nobody forces people to read Phoronix, but if you open a forum and allow people to comment on stuff you publish, you will get your bit of negative comments either way. Whether they are constructive and whether you can deal with constructive critisim is an entirely different matter.

Here is the thing, when questionnaire is not presented in a multiple static choice form the only real useful data is from the actual comments as they were worded. The comments cover a broad range of items which there is just one major theme to most of the "need more configuration options" but very few of them are identical as to what those options are. With multiple choice questionnaires you are left with very vague data without any reasoning behind it unless it is extremely lengthy and detailed. As far as the "attitude" goes the articles reflect why there is "attitude" in the respondents own words. You cannot get any clearer of representation from any other source. It really sounds the biggest gripers about the articles are the ones that had their conspiracy theory disillusioned.

[numasan]

Have you actually read their "features"? They are just as prone as writing negative article as any other site. For example:

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-comment-The-obstacle-course-of-cooperation-1340020.html

H-online doesn't bother doing any testing of their own and rely heavily on user submitted news tips or scraping off of others. It is really nice when you have writers that have the time to report others findings instead of doing a bit of actual investigation for themselves. Their forum activity (or complete lack of) doesn't show a whole lot. Why? Because most of the stuff H-Online is pulled from other sources that do the actual work and summarizes it. Keep in mind that Michael is a one man show for the most part. Not only is he doing the benching, writing, researching, developing for Phoronix but he also has his other 'lives' of running his company and holy crap maybe he can fit in a bit of a personal life in there as well time permitting. Have you guys ever once noticed that articles (usually multiple in a day) often posted for what would be really early in the morning or really really really late at night for him? Cut the man some slack. Have any of you guys even ever tried submitting an article to Michael? It's real easy to bitch about someone's elses work but offer nothing back in aid to change the situation.

Yes, I usually read most of their features. I don't get your example, what is wrong with a "negative article"? Why should they do testing of their own, it is not a benchmarking site. You seem sure they pull stuff directly from other sources (hey it's the internet..) can you point me to a direct example, and what does it have to do with their own features and writing style? So Michael paraphrasing stuff from mailing lists and press releases are different how?

Yes Phoronix is a one man show and he posts a lot of "articles", but quantity != quality. What was the point of this info-dump of his? He could have delivered a far more insightful article with this unique opportunity, thinking about what to do/write about this data until the survey is over. I would personally prefer to read only 2-3 decent articles per week on Phoronix, than Michael stressing him self out pumping out irrelevant stuff for page views. We shouldn't cut him some slack, he should cut himself some slack.

[squirrl]

Time to cook 30 mins

Distributions are where the main problem exists.

Mint includes Gnome 3 because they aren't capable of maintaining Gnome 2 with all the changes that have been made to GTK, Pango, etc.
Debian will include Gnome 3 and remove Gnome 2 same reason as Mint.
Fedora...

Fragmentation:
Too many revisions will fragment your userbase:
Distrowatch
1 Ubuntu 2236 2000 Gnome 2.x users, 50 Unity users, the rest unknown.
2 Mint 2097 All running Gnome 2.x
3 Fedora 1669 1000 Fedora 4 users running Gnome 2.0, 69 Fedora 7 users Gnome 2.1, 10 Fedora 16 users disgruntled about Gnome 3
4 Debian 1313 1200 Debian Squeeze users, 13 Sid users running Lxde, and 5 blackbox users.
5 Arch 1239 1200 KDE 4.7 users, 39 console users still waiting for it to install over 3 MBit connection
6 openSUSE 1233 1233 Kde 3.5 users.

Remember back with ubuntu 8. You could change the login screens and themes very easily.
Now, who knows!!!
I gave up trying to customize Gnome 2.4,5,6,... Unity will be great... Big icon for Excel. Big icon for Firefox.
I still think it just sitting on top of Gnome 3 though.

good night, good fight.

[nzjrs]

Have you actually read their "features"? They are just as prone as writing negative article as any other site. For example:

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-comment-The-obstacle-course-of-cooperation-1340020.html

lolwut?

Did you read that article. It is a very even handed treatment of a complicated situation.

I would love if phoronix kernel articles were similarly written.

[deanjo]

He could have delivered a far more insightful article with this unique opportunity, thinking about what to do/write about this data until the survey is over.

It really sounds like you have not actually read the comments. The comments while full of useful comments that while most of them concentrate on usability and configurability vary greatly with ideas of a better implementation. Many (if not most) of the comments offer alternative ways of how these implementations can be done. This data to developers (as well as enthusiasts) offers far more useful information then a brief blurb saying something along the likes.

The feedback seems to have a trend that people want more configuration and usability enhancements

What is important is finding out what specifically irks people about the product, how they think it should be handled and what would make it more appealing to them. You can have 50 million people think XYZ should be handled like ZYX and then all of a sudden one voice in the crowd makes an alternative suggestion and then everybody starts thinking "Hey that is a better way".

[prokoudine]

So is trying to compare a site with multiple staff to another with a staff of one who actually generates and researches his own content instead of relying on the work of others.

Agreed.

Here is the thing, when questionnaire is not presented in a multiple static choice form the only real useful data is from the actual comments as they were worded.

Which alone is a reason to ask the question, whether it was so unforgivable from GNOME developers to not run exactly this survey.

As far as the "attitude" goes the articles reflect why there is "attitude" in the respondents own words.

Surely I wasn't referring to attitude of the people who participated in the survey

[susikala]

Actually, the writer of that article seems to be Thorsten Leemhuis, who also writes the kernel log for heise.de, which is by the way on a much higher journalistic level than most things posted here (and often contains things not reported here).

On a subjective level, when I came to phoronix around three years ago, this site's attitude was completely different. Maybe it's work nagging away at the owner, or too little income, or whatever, but my feeling is that the articles have become a lot more shallow, a lot more sensationalistic, probably in the attempt to generate more revenue, and a lot less professional (seriously, who cares if you like to drink beer? put it on a blog or something or join proud alcoholists).

I mean, I actually end up reading (actually reading, not skipping through after realising it's a load of crap written just to attract people) around 10% of the articles here. I don't read the benchmarks as I don't care for them, I don't read the weekly 'the wine team has just had another dump', I don't read the packages version updates which I get from distrowatch and other sources, and there are countless other categories I don't even go into. For me, this site's relevance has dropped to about a tenth of what it was three years ago, and I don't imagine I'm the only one.