GNOME's Need To Broaden Its Audience For Greater Impact & Funding

[david-nk]

Message and ideals of GNOME? To ignore everything their users want for a decade and to keep pushing idiotic and useless designs that some of their special snowflakes in the design department came up with? Is that related to these ideals by any chance? Well yeah, good luck with finding new users.

[xorino]

It's been a long time since I saw them using the term Free Software instead of Open Source. This says enough about the "ideals of GNOME" and how much I think they deserve funding.

Please donate to the FSF instead of people fighting against Free Software.

I usually never post here but as someone who stopped being a FSF member i have to say that it is possible to support Free Software without donating to the FSF!!! Human Rights and the Rights of Women, of People with Down Syndrome do matter.

[skeevy420]

scottishduck In your opinion. The major distributors all went with GNOME.

And the most popular ones out of those are GNOME+Lot's 'o Plugins. Outside of a few Phoronix users very few people like or use vanilla GNOME unless they're forced to.

The problem is that vanilla GNOME is a love it or leave it desktop environment. And before y'all go "but plugins, but plugins" how many of y'all go car shopping, find something close enough, and then get a new paint job (plugin), new interior fabric (plugin), and a new steering wheel (plugin) just because you don't care for them? Exactly.

Most people find something that meets their needs as best as possible.

Most people don't find something that doesn't fit their needs and then customize the fuck out of it.

Yeah, that's a bad comment to make on a site full of customizers. We customize everything. I customize the buttons on my gaming controller. But it is a true statement for something like 90% of all people. They find something that works and they just go with it. They don't wanna mess with websites, browser extensions, desktop plugins, package managers, etc. The average person is not a fucking sysadmin. At most they want to dick around in the settings menu and use crap like KDE Discover and the Ubuntu App Store.

TLDR: Motherfuckers don't want a Hobby Lobby desktop.

[gedgon]

How much money does the Foundation spend every year and who gets it?

https://foundation.gnome.org/reports/

Expenses 2019
Administrative $36,622
Conferences $79,368
Employees $421,908
Events $29,986
Marketing $6,418
Internships $27,500
Other $6,531
Total $608,374

IIRC, only one core developer is their employee.

Edit. Well, not anymore (p.-)

[d3coder]

Let's decide for the last time, which DE or DE type is most used by phoronix users

https://strawpoll.com/jj9rj3zsf

[chocolate]

It's been a long time since I saw them using the term Free Software instead of Open Source. This says enough about the "ideals of GNOME" and how much I think they deserve funding.

Please donate to the FSF instead of people fighting against Free Software.

Fundamental, yet painfully not stressed enough most of the time. So sad to see people in charge of major Libre projects not use the proper terminology.

[skeevy420]

Let's decide for the last time, which DE or DE type is most used by phoronix users
https://strawpoll.com/jj9rj3zsf

I wish there was some sort of Phoronix Metrics System and we could report our results to something like open-metrics.org. Like the Steam Survey, only reliable and open. I'd be interested to see our metrics as a community.

Plus it seems kind of stupid for every distribution to invent the metrics reporting wheel. Install open-metrics or have it come preinstalled and it can report a user's shell, desktop, distribution, kernel, and more all anonymously by default. If people want to post publicly to go "this is me and this is what I use" then they should be allowed to do that. People could go to each other's open-metrics account to see each others' setups.

[n64bomb]

Maybe if there was a way to minimize windows instead of either closing them or moving them to another workstation. Also, no dock in vanilla gnome, despite 57% of people use a dock. No wonder why it isn't doing well. Gnome isn't in touch with the people using it. Gnome requires so much customization out of the box on features that should just work.

[peterdk]

Tried to donate, but it's creditcard only and no PayPal option. Yeah, maybe add that for non US users?

[Mez']

It's funny how Gnome people are blind.
They're wondering how to get public attention and more traction. Yet, the solution is right in front of them and they ignore it.

Stop burying your head in the sand, get way closer to your users, and start listening to them.

And that's it! A tsunami of traction gained.