GNOME Is Losing Relevance On The Linux Desktop

[Teho]

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

According to Ohloh 220 developers have contributed to GTK+ during the past year.

[Popolon]

Already switched to XFCE

Already switched to XFCE since ubuntu 11.10. In think also about switching to another debian based distro, but I like ubuntu because of ppa, that is a good intermediate in lot of case between personal recompilation and standard distro packages.

[squirrl]

Unsustainable

Now would be a good time for Linux-Desktop to sell itself because of the world-economy.

The desktop involved people are too busy re-inventing themselves.

Borg was once a great Tennis player. Early in his career he retired to become a clothing expert. He failed.

Gnome and KDE were great desktops. They tried becoming Cell Phones. They've failed.

I commend Valve for their efforts.

Hopefully they'll have their game install a copy of Linux Mint along with the various PPA's and drivers.

I personally hope Apple will cut their prices.

Adieu Linux, adieu Tetsurio and Galaxy Express!

[Teho]

Gnome and KDE were great desktops. They tried becoming Cell Phones. They've failed.

At what point exactly has KDE tried to become a cell phone? KDE has used the same UI paradigm for as long as it has existed. There are effots to create tablet and smartphone interfaces for KDE but the desktop will be kept separate. This is possible at both the application and the shell level thanks to QML and Plasma. Same binaries can even have different UIs on different formfactors. Altough the interfaces can be completely different you can still share ~90% of the code.

[arcas]

GNOME is losing market and mind-share.

There's an important lesson to be learned here. When you annoy a significant portion of your technical user base, you will lose those users as they find alternatives. The GNOME team's decision to streamline the interface and remove configuration options because users were deemed too easily confused or too dumb to use them smacked of hubris. This was exacerbated at the time by the general lack of quality extensions to restore some of the usability that the default interface eliminated in favor of stark simplicity.

GNOME 3 disrupted a workflow that I'd honed for years. Gone were familiar applets so the desktop, while clean, conveyed depressingly little information at a glance. The dynamic workspace renumbering paradigm just didn't (and still doesn't) work for me. If the last window on workspace #3 goes away, I don't want workspaces 4, 5 and 6 to be magically renumbered. I felt less efficient and less productive.

I'm told that GNOME 3's dearth of extensions has since been remedied and that it's now possible to configure a usable DE based on these extensions. But the whole GNOME 3.0/3.1 experience left a bad taste in my mouth. They pretty much lost me as a user when they decided that they knew better than me how my workflow should...flow.

[73837]

Been there.

First long time Ubuntu user, until Unity came, then switched to Fedora 15 and Gnome 3 / Gnome Shell.
I've been quite enthusisastic about it at first, but using it at work I realized that it isn't as intuitive as it seemed at first.
I've found out that my productivity suffered because of the UI.

So I started to look for an alternative. Tried Xfce yet again, but just couldn't get used to the design.

A few weeks ago I discovered Cinnamon and I love it. All the Gnome 3 eye-candy with the usability of Gnome 2. Great stuff.

Regards, Peter

[9a3eedi]

It's interesting how cinnamon is one of the main reasons many people decide to use Gnome 3, when cinnamon is supposed to bring back the gnome 2 desktop style. So basically, a lot of gnome 3 users are using it in a gnome 2 way.

[uid313]

It's interesting how cinnamon is one of the main reasons many people decide to use Gnome 3, when cinnamon is supposed to bring back the gnome 2 desktop style. So basically, a lot of gnome 3 users are using it in a gnome 2 way.

I just wish Cinnamon were available in the Ubuntu repository.

[johnc]

I just wish Cinnamon were available in the Ubuntu repository.

There is a third-party PPA fwiw:

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Unity-alternatives-the-many-desktops-of-Ubuntu-1614860.html

[crhylove]

MINT!

Created an account on phoronix so I could jump in and tell you all how much better Mint is than Ubuntu. Give it a shot. It's the native Cinnamon desktop, although I prefer the XFCE x64 edition.