Fedora Clarifies Stance On Forks Like Cinnamon, Mate

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Clarifies Stance On Forks Like Cinnamon, Mate

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has clarified their stance on how the Fedora Project should view software forks. In particular, forks with much talk these like the Cinnamon and Mate desktop environments...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA2MzM

[scionicspectre]

MATE isn't capitalized in the article title.

Although I've had some involvement with MATE, I'd say it's going to be difficult to maintain and reach their goals unless a lot more developers hop on. This seems highly unlikely. I think it would make much more sense to contribute to XFCE to make it a complete alternative to GNOME 2 if there's something missing that should be there. To my knowledge, there is very little you can do in GNOME 2 you can't do in XFCE- primarily scrubbing across menus in the panels. You can run GNOME 2 applets, themes work correctly- what more do people want?

Especially considering the completeness and suitability of XFCE for daily use, I think it would make more sense. After all, Linus uses it. ^_~

I think it's great that people build new projects from existing code, but I wish they'd split a bit further away on the stack. For instance, if Cinnamon were built on Clutter, but not so similar to the Shell as to be problematic. There's bound to be a time when Cinnamon and the Shell aren't compatible in some fundamental way, and Cinnamon users are going to feel like they have the right to impose that compatibility on GNOME, when they most certainly don't. It's like someone coming into your house, taking your clothes (which you freely offered), bringing them back hemmed, and then forcing you to hem your pants the same way.

Eventually it's gonna' bite them, just as Unity's scrollbars and other modifications to GTK have left them out of all but their own distro. Luckily these patches are tiny, but you can see the problem- these communities depend on upstream, they go in a wildly divergent direction, and then people expect upstream to change just because the spin-off is popular.

It's much easier to depend on cooperation than continually correct whatever upstream 'isn't doing right'. The Elementary team with Granite is a good example of how you should create new projects with necessary differences.

[hoohoo]

What the Fedora and to a degree also the Ubuntu devs do not understand

... is that just because the Gnome people decided to throw out a well established UI metaphor and codebase and start pushing the idea of a netbook/smartphone UI on PC size monitors... that does not mean the Linux distros have to agree. You know: just because someone _offers_ you a bag of sh*t, you don't have to take it.

Certainly it does not mean the distros (Fedora, I'm looking at you) have to make it difficult for users to go back to Gnome 2. I don't want to get into distro-religious-war here, but OpenSuSE actually hosts pages showing how to switch from KDE4.x to KDE3.5 for newer releases (KDE man me, not so much Gnome man), I am sure other distros also offer their users a choice.

I don't entirely lump Ubuntu with Fedora because Ubuntu has a couple of ways to avoid using the ridiculous netbook G3 UI, though I think they are all just skins. When I tried Fedora last week it was pretty Fascist about the desktop: getting rid of netbook G3 UI for G2 UI was very difficult.

I do not know what the GNOME people are smoking but it must be pretty potent stuff. What works on a smartphone or netbook size *touchscreen* is just silly on a 19" or 24" monitor+mouse.

Fact is that Gnome 3 is a new completely different desktop concept from Gnome 2. G3 should be treated as a different and alternative product to G2, and NOT as a replacement.

[Fenrin]

...
Fact is that Gnome 3 is a new completely different desktop concept from Gnome 2. G3 should be treated as a different and alternative product to G2, and NOT as a replacement.

only if you use Gnome 3 shell, but it's your choice to either use Gnome 3 Fallback mode, Cinnamon or XFCE 4.8. These DE's are not very different from Gnome 2.

IMHO it's a good choice for a distro to officially support only a limited number of desktop environments (if it's a bleeding edge distro like Fedora it makes much more sense to support Gnome 3, XFCE 4 and KDE 4 instead of outdated DE's). If anyone wants to use Mate on Fedora, it's possible to use community contributed rpm packages.

[hoohoo]

only if you use Gnome 3 shell, but it's your choice to either use Gnome 3 Fallback mode, Cinnamon or XFCE 4.8. These DE's are not very different from Gnome 2.

IMHO it's a good choice for a distro to officially support only a limited number of desktop environments (if it's a bleeding edge distro like Fedora it makes much more sense to support Gnome 3, XFCE 4 and KDE 4 instead of outdated DE's). If anyone wants to use Mate on Fedora, it's possible to use community contributed rpm packages.

Different strokes for different folks, no problem.

However, consider the 2cm tall black strip across the top of the Gnome 3 screen, which contains IIRC 5 items (activities button, time, sound icon, network icon and 'user' icon) but mostly just empty space - what is the idea with that? I pay good money for a monitor and some person at Gnome decides he will just make 10% of my monitor unavailable to me if I use G3. That makes no sense to me.

I could go on, but I know G3 vs G2 has been beaten to death in many other fora.

[Awesomeness]

What the Fedora and to a degree also the Ubuntu devs do not understand is that just because the Gnome people decided to throw out a well established UI metaphor and codebase and start pushing the idea of a netbook/smartphone UI on PC size monitors... that does not mean the Linux distros have to agree.

What YOU do not understand is that both Fedora and GNOME Shell are Red Hat products. There is a not-so-small overlap of people who create Fedora as well as GNOME Shell.
It's in RH's full right to prefer its own DE over a competitor as default. And RH even has no problems shipping alternatives: As anyone knows after reading that article, the alternatives just must not cause installation conflicts. If Cinnamon installs just fine besides GNOME Shell and someone maintains that package, Fedora will ship it.

[leif81]

"contribute upstream to an existing project"

ding ding ding.

If you don't like GNOME 3 make an extension, supply a patch or whatever.

The average user doesn't even need to write a line of code. A quick browse around https://extensions.gnome.org and you'll find multiple ways to make your GNOME 3 shell behave more like GNOME 2.

My personal opinion is that GNOME 3 should ship with two official shell layouts; modern (being the current default) and classic. A simple dialog on first login could ask which they prefer. Chances are many would want to take "modern" for a spin anyways.

[hoohoo]

"contribute upstream to an existing project"

ding ding ding.

If you don't like GNOME 3 make an extension, supply a patch or whatever.

The average user doesn't even need to write a line of code. A quick browse around https://extensions.gnome.org and you'll find multiple ways to make your GNOME 3 shell behave more like GNOME 2.

My personal opinion is that GNOME 3 should ship with two official shell layouts; modern (being the current default) and classic. A simple dialog on first login could ask which they prefer. Chances are many would want to take "modern" for a spin anyways.

That's a fine solution.

As for "modern"... new does not always mean better.

[hoohoo]

What YOU do not understand is that both Fedora and GNOME Shell are Red Hat products. There is a not-so-small overlap of people who create Fedora as well as GNOME Shell.
It's in RH's full right to prefer its own DE over a competitor as default. And RH even has no problems shipping alternatives: As anyone knows after reading that article, the alternatives just must not cause installation conflicts. If Cinnamon installs just fine besides GNOME Shell and someone maintains that package, Fedora will ship it.

I did not know Gnome is produced by Red Hat. Still I cannot see why Fedora pushes it so hard. Fedora is supposed to be at arms length from Redhat, no?

[elanthis]

I did not know Gnome is produced by Red Hat. Still I cannot see why Fedora pushes it so hard. Fedora is supposed to be at arms length from Redhat, no?

The vast majority of GNOME contributors are also Fedora users. While many of those people are Red Hat employees, it is nonsense to call GNOME a Red Hat project. Most GNOME developers have no connection to Red Hat. GNOME is also not a Fedora project, but Fedora is close to being the "distro of choice" for most core GNOME devs.