The GNOME Foundation Is Running Short On Money

[daedaluz]

It depends on situation, some things are improvement, some are not. But put yourself in beginner user shoes, for this kind of user it would be easier to know which application belongs to certain category, like Accessories, Graphics, Internet, Office, Sound & Video, Administration, System Tools etc. instead all putting in one place.
UI must be intuitive, simple.

Lack of categories sure wasn't confusing to people rushing to buy iPads. Also look at the typical GNOME application names as they appear in menus: "Files", "Maps", "Document Viewer", "System Monitor", "Clocks", "Disks"... self-explanatory names. I can understand the problem for KDE users. Took me a good while to figure out that KSysGuard is actually a system monitor.

You are right, things have changed. I installed Arch Linux with GNOME 3.10.2. Things got improved. As I said previously, I like clean UI design, and here GNOME 3 shines, but also I need to adapt to this kind of UI and different kind of workflow, more than on some other DE's with "traditional" UI desktop metaphor.

I'd say that doing something new well enough makes old things obsolete. People switch from Windows to Mac all the time. Not many of them are longing to get back their familiar 1995's taskbar. GNOME is definitely on right track on that sense. Read some recent reviews on 3.10 to see for yourself. It gets praise everywhere. If any desktop on market right now could be able to pull off Year Of Linux Desktop, my bet would be on GNOME3. All others have tried and failed already.

Obviously Canonical with Unity, Linux Mint with Cinnamon and MATE and its users don't know how GNOME 3 great and effective is. GNOME 3 is best thing since sliced bread and people are to stubborn or not enough progressive to realise that, just like Windows users don't know how Metro UI is great and stay on Windows 7.

Canonical has its own goals and no other desktop can fit their vision. Cinnamon and Mate were just reactions to change, but I don't think they matter to GNOME3 any more than existence of LXDE or XFCE mattered to GNOME2. The fact that most popular distros Fedora and CentOS aside are not having GNOME as default is the indicator of unpopularity you want. Even there keep in mind that to actually get fully functioning GNOME you need systemd and only few distros have it by default, so it makes sense to not use GNOME yet for technical reasons, too.

[RahulSundaram]

I hope I am wrong

You are. Contrary to your claim, we all already know that GNOME did hire female developers and you can easily verify this for yourself without trying to undermine them just because they happen to be females. The tendency for others to do this is precisely why OPW was setup in the first place.

[profoundWHALE]

http://link.springer.com/article/10....:1018839203698

"Both men and women were more likely to vote to hire a male job applicant than a female job applicant with an identical record. Similarly, both sexes reported that the male job applicant had done adequate teaching, research, and service experience compared to the female job applicant with an identical record. "

Lesson time. Sexism, like racism, is prejudice. What is more often seen is stereotypes, and there's a huge difference. Stereotypes are essentially generalizations, like generally males are working full time, or can carry heavier things, or aren't compensated like females for maternity. Those readings can go even further leading into aspects of personality. Are males who are coders more likely to be hired simply because they generally have this kind of a personality?

But the worst part is how you ignore the fact that you are talking about women's rights, on a topic about gnome funding, read predominately by males. You end up coming across as an annoyance demanding attention from the same people you feel that women are oppressed by. This is why it seems like no one cares... because even though (I'm sure that) most people agree that the male to female ratio is off and should be worked on, they don't agree you or the way that you are presenting your case.

Okay, so back on topic, which if I remember correctly, it had to do with Gnome being built for tablets as if, well, tablets were a bad thing. I don't like clicking the wrong thing, and I like it to be easy to find what I'm looking for. It's why Ubuntu is so popular, and it's why Gnome is so popular, and it's also why Crunchbang is my favourite. I like being able to right click basically anywhere and getting a menu and making it ridiculously easy to customize without having to know much about coding. Of course, it's not a tablet interface, but it's simple, fast, and gets the job done.

I was very impressed by the polish of Gnome 3, which at the time I felt was better than Ubuntu's Unity. (Fedora 17 or 18)

I've used KDE but I wasn't terribly impressed because it felt too much like Windows XP and it was missing some of that polish I was talking about earlier. Some of the additions reminded me of Vista (widgets I think they are called). But what I absolutely loved was the volume controls. Somehow it let me output sound to multiple sound cards simultaneously, and all I'd have to do is drag the volume sliders for the different outputs.

LXDE and XFCE I've tried. LXDE seemed about as light as XFCE but didn't really look as good and was missing quite a few features. XFCE for me, maybe some driver issue, was wonky. It's been a long time and my memory is terrible.
Basically for me personally:
Unity: Love, but the search function is getting weird
Gnome: Like, but haven't used it enough to get used to it and know if I'll love it or not.
Openbox: Love, it's simple, fast, but you'll need to install add-ons for some things.
KDE: Good, it needs polish (which I know they are working on) and it feels bloated as in, not very responsive.
XFCE: Not much point using when there's LXDE and KDE
LXDE: Good, it's light, but it feels less like a smooth, light desktop and more like a light desktop.
Cinnamon: Great, my favourite of the windows style alternatives.

[kpedersen]

The "social" debate about prejudice bores me (this kind of stuff belongs on twitter, not a UNIX / gaming forums ) so I glossed over that part but your DE observations were interesting. In particular..

...
KDE: Good, it needs polish (which I know they are working on) and it feels bloated as in, not very responsive.
XFCE: Not much point using when there's LXDE and KDE
LXDE: Good, it's light, but it feels less like a smooth, light desktop and more like a light desktop.
...

Since both KDE or LXDE provide issues (bloated or too light). It seems that there *is* a point in Xfce

It just shows that having a massive choice of desktops is a benefit when the others become unbalanced. The fact that Gnome 3 and Unity are kind of strangling all the others (i.e by breaking many shared dependencies) really does seem counter to the whole OSS ideal.

[Rallos Zek]

I'm rather sure GNOME project has spent more on UI research with real experts via RedHat than competition. My guesstimate for amount of money KDE e.V. has spent is $0 because it's a horrible piece of shit. Right now there are some poor souls in Visual Group slaving at it for free at it because everyone knows default KDE sucks donkey dicks. And even they face resistance from people like Martin who think there is absolutely nothing wrong.
.

And yet KDE is miles ahead of Gnome in functionality and useability go figure.

[fanATic]

Lack of categories sure wasn't confusing to people rushing to buy iPads. Also look at the typical GNOME application names as they appear in menus: "Files", "Maps", "Document Viewer", "System Monitor", "Clocks", "Disks"... self-explanatory names. I can understand the problem for KDE users. Took me a good while to figure out that KSysGuard is actually a system monitor.

Nautilus -> Files, Epiphany -> Web.
Anyway, long gone are the days when for GNOME apps were unwritten rule naming it with letter G, gno, gna, gnu as for KDE apps were mandatory choosing name which contains letter K, or simply putting letter K on front, hence KSysGuard.

The fact that most popular distros Fedora and CentOS aside are not having GNOME as default is the indicator of unpopularity you want.

Including Debian until 7.0
Red Hat is main contributor to GNOME like openSUSE is to KDE and was to GNOME (Novell and Ximian story) to some extent.

[TheBlackCat]

default application menu design

Which was made using "UI research with real experts". If you are going to tout the importance of "UI research with real experts", then you should accept the results they come up with.

I need massive tweaking in KDE just to get IME working and even after all the efforts it is broken (fcitx which works slightly better than ibus works differently in Qt and GTK applications under KDE but even though it is not GNOME native it works better in GNOME by providing uniform entry... go figure..) and keyboard switching is restricted to two alternatives by keyboard shortcuts.

My version of KDE comes with a very nice input method frontend that does all of that and more.

Not to mention how GTK applications never appear right in KDE no matter how much effort.

Then complain to GTK devs about their refusal to use the native theme when run in a Qt DE (or any other DE, for that matter), or their routine breakage of existing themes. Qt is designed to look native when run under a GTK-based DE (or pretty much any other DE), but Gnome devs have flat-out refused to do the same, leaving KDE devs to do their best to create a native-looking GTK theme and maintain it while Gnome keeps making releases that break existing themes.

Just google for "kde baloo" at their latest sorry attempt at fixing that after so many years.

Right, because tracker never, ever consumes too many resources. Gnome apps keep on pulling in tracker, which then immediately slows my quad-core, 8gb RAM laptop to a crawl. And it can't even be turned off without editing a text file. Gnome is not the best example on how to implent a good semantic search tool.

It takes half an hour just to disable all the useless notifications, one KNotify linked application at a time, selected from dropdown menu, every single notification disabled individually.

Or just disable applications notifications in the notifier widget (three or four clicks), or turn off the notifier widget entirely (also three clicks).

[daedaluz]

Which was made using "UI research with real experts". If you are going to tout the importance of "UI research with real experts", then you should accept the results they come up with.

It was? They did a horrible job. Tiny breadcrumb navigation in application menu, seriously wtf. They just went and removed the big convenient back button and replaced it with something that belongs to file manager. Not only that! You have one card game installed, it's under Games. Great! Install one more, and both go under Games > Card Games. Such consistency. There is just so much wrong with Kickoff. Homerun is what it should have been in the first place.

My version of KDE comes with a very nice input method frontend that does all of that and more.

Care to name it and all the components required? Thing is, IBUS is integrated into GNOME, so multilingual users me included don't even have to think about it on any distro. It just works, guaranteed. What baffles me is how it is even possible that fcitx worked flawlessly in GNOME but not in KDE. There is something very very wrong in core design of KDE. I hope they succeed with KDE5. I might even give it a go in 2020 when it's stable (looking at their previous track record).

Then complain to GTK devs about their refusal to use the native theme when run in a Qt DE (or any other DE, for that matter), or their routine breakage of existing themes. Qt is designed to look native when run under a GTK-based DE (or pretty much any other DE), but Gnome devs have flat-out refused to do the same, leaving KDE devs to do their best to create a native-looking GTK theme and maintain it while Gnome keeps making releases that break existing themes.

Yup, Qt was designed to be portable. GTK was not, so it wasn't really a complaint. I pointed out that major applications like Firefox, Chrome and Libreoffice look and work weird in KDE. I actually think KDE devs are overdoing the need to integrate GTK or Wx or Tk applications into Qt. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't URL bar dropdown in Firefox ugly oxygen grey?

Right, because tracker never, ever consumes too many resources. Gnome apps keep on pulling in tracker, which then immediately slows my quad-core, 8gb RAM laptop to a crawl. And it can't even be turned off without editing a text file. Gnome is not the best example on how to implent a good semantic search tool.

Yup, it doesn't. See the default priorities. It has crapped on me once when I started syncing contacts from Exchange remote server locally on laptop without really thinking it through (thousands of contacts). And it isn't even trying to be semantic in sense strigi/akonadi tried (and failed), btw.

Or just disable applications notifications in the notifier widget (three or four clicks), or turn off the notifier widget entirely (also three clicks).

More effort but over long period of time OR missing mails and chat messages.

Now, I don't think GNOME is perfect. There is a lot of room for honing. I think Tweak Tool should be integrated to Settings, maybe under "Advanced" view. Small things like smaller font size by default and less whitespace on Adwaita and one glitch needs to be fixed. Saner icon spacing in activities view. Ability to toggle smaller toolbar buttons across all applications much needed. And bring back the integrated chat menu toggle from 3.8, it was awesome. User folders are coming to application view, great. But those small things aside, most important thing is that all the things that should just work actually do just work, hassle-free. I've created my own Adwaita derivative and custom gnome-shell.css to make it more perfect. That little vimming took less than the time I've wasted battling with bluetooth/wifi/displays/indexing/theming/kwin/rendering/kontact/ime from KDE 4.2 to 4.10 when I finally said "fuck it, this piece of shit just doesn't work and apparently never will" and never looked back (okay I did briefly out of curiosity with Kubuntu 14.04... just to witness how search is completely broken again. gg, really, gg).

[profoundWHALE]

The "social" debate about prejudice bores me (this kind of stuff belongs on twitter, not a UNIX / gaming forums ) so I glossed over that part but your DE observations were interesting. In particular..



Since both KDE or LXDE provide issues (bloated or too light). It seems that there *is* a point in Xfce

It just shows that having a massive choice of desktops is a benefit when the others become unbalanced. The fact that Gnome 3 and Unity are kind of strangling all the others (i.e by breaking many shared dependencies) really does seem counter to the whole OSS ideal.

Ah, sorry, I should have said:
Doesn't make much sense for me. But you're right, if you're looking for a balance between KDE and LXDE, then XFCE is a good way to go.

[grndzro]

The more I read all this the more happy I am with Openbox....
If I need something I stick it on docky. piece of cake.

Commonly used programs on left dock. less used ones on right dock.
Combined taskbar and desktop panel autohide on bottom. With calendar and clock.
Pin directories I need to access in FVD speed dial. Usefull for Wine launches.