The New Control Center Is Being Worked On For GNOME 3.22

[gedgon]

You must be joking. Have you tried to import an OpenVpn file into network manager ? I was unable to do it and I spent a good amount of time searching. It took five minutes to set it up in Android.

I think it's pretty straightforward.

[chrisb]

Your questions suggest a top down development model which isn't how open source projects works typically. Nobody ever contributors to the Linux kernel based on a public roadmap and a priority list for example. People work on whatever they want to. They are sometimes employed by companies competing with each other. Many of them are volunteers. This is a rather messy process but I don't see how any open source project would work well with a centralized top down approach.

Gnome has always had a more top down approach than the Linux kernel. Miguel de Icaza was the original visionary who set long term development goals and made key project decisions (even unpopular choices like using .NET) , and then the GNOME Steering Committee was established to do the same. Now the Gnome Foundation say they set the vision and goals for future releases. Gnome has public roadmaps and feature plans - sure it's mostly a volunteer project and goals might not always get implemented, but they are trying to be top down.

This is a rather messy process but I don't see how any open source project would work well with a centralized top down approach.

There are examples, usually where a single company creates and/or manages an open source project, contributes developers and commercialises an end product. Android is the obvious one I can think of, also Chrome, SugarCRM, Asterisk, Java, JBoss, Mono, MySQL, Qt, Zope, Eclipse. The companies behind these projects develop road maps and feature lists and assign developers to work on them.

[k1e0x]

Am I the only one that feels like the Gnome team is trying to follow Windows 10? I genuinely hate the new Windows 10 control panel, since they've hidden away so much stuff I want to change behind extra layers of settings. But the left-side navigation bar might not be such a bad idea, as long as you can actually find stuff there.

You kidding? I can't work on Windows 10 at all. Everything is a total mess and every aspect of it looks different from every other aspect. (just right click on something and look at the fonts) It's got ribbon tool bars all over that are inconsistent from every other one and it nags and interrupts you like a needy child and keeps getting in your face about everything. Gnome is all about getting out of your way. Providing the most common actions to people not every possible action (like KDE does) I think a lot of people don't get this about Gnome and they keep trying to change the way it works with crappy and poorly supported extensions rather than taking the time to learn how it works. Things like taskbar extensions?? why? press the super key once maybe? lol .. They keep fighting it and I'm not surprised a lot of people hate it because of that but sometimes you have to change things when you want to make them better. I really think its a fantastic DE. Things like MATE confuse me because we already have a lightweight GTK based desktop XFCE.. so whats the point of continuing to maintain old Gnome? : shrug : To each their own..

[grndzro]

As a mouse centric user I actually like the way Gnome is set up. The extensions allow a high amount of customization with features not found on other desktops.

Anyone who dislikes Gnome hasn't played around with the extensions, or has ingrained hatred tied to past experiences. Either way they are pathologically stupid.

[RahulSundaram]

Gnome has always had a more top down approach than the Linux kernel. Miguel de Icaza was the original visionary who set long term development goals and made key project decisions (even unpopular choices like using .NET) , and then the GNOME Steering Committee was established to do the same. Now the Gnome Foundation say they set the vision and goals for future releases. Gnome has public roadmaps and feature plans - sure it's mostly a volunteer project and goals might not always get implemented, but they are trying to be top down.

Your understanding is pretty off base. GNOME Foundation explicitly does not control the technical direction of the project. The roadmaps are merely a collection of plans driven bottom up by individual maintainers. This is the opposite of a top down model.

There are examples, usually where a single company creates and/or manages an open source project, contributes developers and commercialises an end product.

The vast majority of them are open core. Not open source.

[k1e0x]

As a mouse centric user I actually like the way Gnome is set up. The extensions allow a high amount of customization with features not found on other desktops.

Anyone who dislikes Gnome hasn't played around with the extensions, or has ingrained hatred tied to past experiences. Either way they are pathologically stupid.

UI's are one way to really get my goat. I could talk for days about them. I seen one post up here or maybe somewhere else where someone was complaining about the "Gnome Application Menu" needed better categorization support. I was like :rage: Gnome dose not have an Application Menu! Thats an extension installed by some distro :facepalm:

Edit: and yes the mouse control is well thought out in Gnome, the easiest part of the screen to access is the top of the screen because it takes the least amount of fine movement to get there. You can basically fall on a mouse and the cursor will go to the top. That's why the top bar is on the top and not the bottom. Way back a long time ago Sun Microsystems payed for scientific user data to be collected for Gnome.. some of Gnome 3 is the result of that.

[chrisb]

Your understanding is pretty off base. GNOME Foundation explicitly does not control the technical direction of the project.

Maybe not, but Gnome Foundation Charter says "The GNOME foundation will provide a sense of leadership and cohesive direction to the GNOME project. The foundation will work to communicate a vision and set of goals for the future releases of GNOME.".

They also say that they "steer releases" and "act as a guiding hand" in the development process. It sounds like they wanted to provide the kind of technical direction that Miguel did. Miguel definitely had a long term vision for Gnome and he pushed the project with that in mind. Under his leadership a company was formed to develop and market products, he envisaged future developments and set new project directions and created new technologies based on that vision (Bonobo, Mono etc.) Helix Code / Ximian was a founding member of the Gnome Foundation and sold commercial products based on Gnome. Even after the Novell acquisition he kept setting direction to pushing the project forward as an enterprise desktop, and Novell had professional programmers working on his goals. Miguel did set technical direction, in a way that Linus Torvalds never has.

Admittedly, things may have changed since the Miguel days, and perhaps Gnome now has no technical steering, but historically this did not seem to be the case.

The vast majority of them are open core. Not open source.

More like GPL and dual licensed. Most don't fit the definition of open core since the open source versions aren't feature limited. AOSP and MySQL are the only two that might be considered "open core", and even there MySQL is available from Oracle as a fully functional open source version, and AOSP is fully functional too (Google apps, Play Store etc. are not - but these are independent of AOSP and it is possible to use and ship AOSP alone as Cyanogenmod, Amazon and hundreds of Chinese OEMs have proved). Afaik the open source versions of Asterisk, OpenJDK, JBoss, QT, Mono, Zope and Eclipse are all fully featured, even though some are also available under closed license.

edit: also I mentioned Chrome, which could be classed as open core, since it is bundled with Flash and a few closed source media codecs. I'd say it's more a case of bundling independent stuff rather than limiting features though, since Chromium is a fully featured web browser and the codecs and Flash are arguably independent and can be provided by the OS. The Blink engine is fully open source fwiw and is fully featured as used by Samsung, Opera and QT.

[starshipeleven]

UI's are one way to really get my goat. I could talk for days about them. I seen one post up here or maybe somewhere else where someone was complaining about the "Gnome Application Menu" needed better categorization support. I was like :rage: Gnome dose not have an Application Menu! Thats an extension installed by some distro :facepalm:

Edit: and yes the mouse control is well thought out in Gnome, the easiest part of the screen to access is the top of the screen because it takes the least amount of fine movement to get there. You can basically fall on a mouse and the cursor will go to the top. That's why the top bar is on the top and not the bottom. Way back a long time ago Sun Microsystems payed for scientific user data to be collected for Gnome.. some of Gnome 3 is the result of that.

Yeah, the app menu thing going fullscreen with application icons big as win8 tiles and no sign of categories to at least split them isn't by GNOME, it's added by the Greys while none's watching.

[RahulSundaram]

Maybe not, but Gnome Foundation Charter says "The GNOME foundation will provide a sense of leadership and cohesive direction to the GNOME project. The foundation will work to communicate a vision and set of goals for the future releases of GNOME.".

They also say that they "steer releases" and "act as a guiding hand" in the development process. It sounds like they wanted to provide the kind of technical direction that Miguel did.

There is no maybe here. Technical direction is NOT part of their charter. This has been reaffirmed in many places. For example

https://paulcutler.org/blog/tag/gnome-foundation/

"I thought this would help prepare me for being on the Board, especially as the Board does not set technical direction for GNOME"

The foundation is a legal entity and doesn't get involved in technical directions of the project. I don't believe Miguel ever really managed to set the
direction for the project on the whole. Feel free to provide direct references to the contrary if you have any. He is very much ancient history anyway.

More like GPL and dual licensed. Most don't fit the definition of open core since the open source versions aren't feature limited.

Many of them absolutely are feature limited.

Chrome - Has proprietary features and functionality that Chromium does not support. Yes, it is feature limited when you can't play say Netflix in the open source browser.
Mono - Definitely had proprietary features and even bug fixes that Xamarin didn't make available until well after the MS acquisition.
Qt - Until recently several proprietary modules.
MySQL - proprietary features that only enterprise edition has

I could go on but you get the point. GNOME is not managed like any of these examples.

[k1e0x]

Yeah, the app menu thing going fullscreen with application icons big as win8 tiles and no sign of categories to at least split them isn't by GNOME, it's added by the Greys while none's watching.

Case in point. You see your taking about the "shell overlay". This is the Application Menu everyone talks about https://extensions.gnome.org/extensi...ications-menu/ Hea look. NOT made by aliens OR gnome-project. I take it your not a Gnome user..