The Future Of GNOME: Very Optimistic?

Following the controversial information this weekend about some viewing GNOME as fading into abyss and losing relevance on the desktop, Christian Schaller has shared his views on the future of GNOME. In general he is very optimistic about the future of GNOME.

In a lengthy blog post, this GNOME contributor has come out to share his views on the future of GNOME. He sums up his thoughts with, "In general I am very optimistic about the future, the strenght of the open source ecosystem is not that we have more developers to assign to a given project at a given time than Windows or Mac, but no matter what they do we keep moving forward on all fronts, so while Apple and Microsoft focus on beating each other in the tablet and phone space, maybe the time is ripe for us to strenghten our positions in the server and desktop markets? I mean tablets and phones might be all the rage atm, and maybe they are bigger markets than the traditional server and desktop market, but the server and desktop markets are still huge and ripe with opportunity if we play our cards right. And if we can deprive Microsoft of things like their Office cash cow, then that levels the playing field all the more when we later take them on again in other areas."

He also shares hopes that Valve supporting Steam on Linux and the Humble Indie Bundles will lead to greater work on Mesa and open-source AMD/NVIDIA drivers. "Microsoft has long ago abanndoned PC gaming in favour of the Xbox, lets see if we can make Linux fill the gap." Christian sees advancing the Linux desktop as working on the underlying components rather than just hacking on the GNOME Shell. "And as for taking the desktop to the next level I think the main challenge for GNOME is not inside the GNOME 3 desktop, but instead it is a question of if the open source community can come together around pushing things like the Linux OpenGL support forward and make sure we have a strong foundation for supporting games and improving visual effects in the desktop."

Read his blog for more details on his thoughts and why he doesn't believe GNOME is fading into abyss. If you missed it as well, some GNOME developers are planning for GNOME 4.0 and GNOME OS in 2014.