GNOME Is Losing Relevance On The Linux Desktop

[kgonzales]

EDIT:
P.S. you wasted money on your Mac.

P.S. you have no clue what you are talking about.

[9a3eedi]

The whole idea of the Mate Desktop was flawed to begin with because it really is unsustainable (in the long term) and has no place to go (in terms of development). I remember when the project first started out and it was a bad idea to begin with, IMO. What i think would have been a much smarter move (and easier to maintain) would have been to fork gnome-panel (gtk3) and add the functionality missing (using gtk3/gnome3 tech) and whatever other bits of software the features correspond to.

What is so unsustainable about it? I think what you're referring to is how MATE uses gtk2, which is getting phased out in favor of gtk3. If MATE really does stick to gtk2 then I agree it would be very unsustainable, but they already plan to port everything to gtk3 in their roadmap, http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/roadmap .. and that shouldn't be too difficult, I think, and wouldn't cause too big of drastic changes in the UI.

Or has the gnome2 code become unmaintainable or something? In that case, they could always do a rewrite.

What the MATE developers are doing right now is just making sure nothing is conflicting with gnome programs, so they're forking/renaming everything and making sure every libarry goes in their proper directories.. I guess that does take some time, especially when their development team is so small (for now)

I'm a mate user myself, and it's just the perfect desktop for me.. I just couldn't find a good replacement for gnome 2 and I'm sure many others like me feel the same way.

I keep seeing this or variants of it from those complaining about modern desktops. Using the GPU for the window manager actually makes your computer more efficient by reducing the processor load (face it, your Graphics Processing Unit is better suited to processing graphics than your CPU is) This can lead to both power saving (My GPU can run KWin on the lowest power setting without bumping up higher) as well as freeing up CPU time for other processes. In addition, most modern window managers can undirect full windows meaning that for running stuff like games there is literally zero GPU overhead.

I agree, compositing on the GPU really is great, but this is only if the GPU can handle it, and if the drivers are good enoguh, and if the window manager does a good job too. Windows and Mac do a pretty good job on that.. everything is smooth and nice, and the effects don't "get in your way" and are subtle. but most of the window managers I see on Linux don't. They seem to focus a lot on form, maybe a bit of function, but not a lot on stability or quality. I get a very strange latency when I use compositing on Linux, lots of issues, generally feels slower overall. And many managers have way too many effects (especially the fading ones) on by default, and disabling them might not be straightforward.. which is why I tend to prefer using my Linux desktop without compositing for now.

[D0pamine]

too late, no sense in crying over spilled milk but seriously, Gnome only 'defaults' GS if your H/W + driver supports it and if it 'seems' to support it (ie: logs into GS) but doesn't work well, it takes literally a few seconds to change to fallback.

Do you think it makes more sense to cater the 'defaults' to a minority, or is it better to cater to the majority while giving the minority the option to opt-out???

...i tend to think the latter is far more logical, but i get the impression you think the former is infinitely more important (which i think is silly!).

have you tried fallback mode? can i edit panels with ease? can i have my system menu? even with a working gpu i do not want to use a compositing window manager i want my gpu to play games mostly not wow-ing my windoze chums or showing mom how much of a genius i am by installing ubuntu...

last time i tried to run wz2100 with intel gpu inside gnome-shell with all its shite enabled it wouldnt run...

not that i'm too arsed - i can always shut the DE down all together and do an xinit warzone2100 which to be honest i'd rather do than piss around with gnome-shell or unity or cinnamon in fallback mode or not

[liam]

Its 2012, you don't have to keep living like this... Mac sort of has that, but its just a "recent documents" section split by file type. Still, this sounds good. Oh man, that sounds sick!!!! I've been waiting so long for KDE to be able to integrate google stuff. I'm excited. Finally linux pushing the desktop further again and not sticking to the past.

If you are running GS 3.4+ you can register your google, or whatever, account with the shell and get your contacts, chat, docs, and calender integrated. This is achieved with goa and libfolks (the later is also suposed to dedup your contacts so you don't have a separate contact entry for the same person located in different accounts). I can verify that mail, and contacts work. I assume the rest also work bu t I don't know.

[randomizer]

When people say they don't like GNOME 3, are they referring to GNOME 3 or GNOME Shell? Is there something about GNOME 3 that they don't like?

Nobody in their right mind wants GNOME 2. Only a masochist would want to try and maintain that enormous project in the long term. It's dead and it's better dead. Unfortunately GNOME 3 (or perhaps GTK3+ actually) doesn't actually solve all of the annoying little things that made GNOME 2 painful to use sometimes. For example, it seems that the developers still use 2-button mice or 800x600 displays, because they clearly didn't see any reason to make changing your mouse wheel scroll rate doable without arcane rituals.

GNOME Shell, on the other hand, is just a tiny component of the whole project and easily interchangeable with something that fits your workflow best.

[yk11]

I personally like the simplicity gnome 2 offers.

After using it for so many years my workflow and desktop layout fit like a glove.

Due to the many changes Ubuntu, and subsequently Mint, have been making to the UI, I've switched to using SolusOS. Versions 1.1 (current stable) is based on gnome2 and debian stable. Version 2 will be based on debian stable and gnome 3 tweaked so it looks/behaves like gnome 2 and with a custom panel that even accepts gnome 2 applets. The best of both worlds!

[johnc]

Nobody in their right mind wants GNOME 2. Only a masochist would want to try and maintain that enormous project in the long term. It's dead and it's better dead. Unfortunately GNOME 3 (or perhaps GTK3+ actually) doesn't actually solve all of the annoying little things that made GNOME 2 painful to use sometimes. For example, it seems that the developers still use 2-button mice or 800x600 displays, because they clearly didn't see any reason to make changing your mouse wheel scroll rate doable without arcane rituals.

GNOME Shell, on the other hand, is just a tiny component of the whole project and easily interchangeable with something that fits your workflow best.

Yeah, this is something that got me a bit disappointed too. As good as GNOME 2 was, there was a lot of stuff that could have been improved and modernized, so moving on to a new version and re-working a lot of stuff under the hood seemed like a good idea. But I don't really recognize any major improvements yet.

E.g., I was kinda surprised when I saw that I still had to hack my way to using different wallpapers on different workspaces.

I'm curious if anybody thinks there's something inherent in GNOME 3 that they don't like. It looks like we lose the ability to have applets in the indicator panel? And I get crazy tearing in GS and Unity (maybe a GNOME 3 problem?). Otherwise I don't see much of a difference either way.

[Koorac]

Only ONE developer maintaining GTK, no one for GLib. No way I will use those libraries for any of my future projects

Luckily Qt has every code change reviewed an a proper continuous integrations system. Also C++/Qt is just way nicer than C

[bwat47]

Only ONE developer maintaining GTK, no one for GLib. No way I will use those libraries for any of my future projects

Luckily Qt has every code change reviewed an a proper continuous integrations system. Also C++/Qt is just way nicer than C

Yeah that certainly sounds like a precarious situation, for such important libraries. Say what you want about KDE (personally interface-wise i still prefer gnome), but QT seems to be in far better shape these days.

[Akka]

Only ONE developer maintaining GTK, no one for GLib. No way I will use those libraries for any of my future projects

One full time dev. I suppose they have a way more part time devs and maintainer for specific future?